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WORKS OF 



WILLIAM MATHEWS, 



IN THE ORDER OF THEIR PUBLICATION. 



GETTING ON IN THE WORLD; or, 
Hints on Success in JLife. 1 volume. 
12mo. Pages 374. Price $2 00 

THE GREAT CONVERSERS, and 

Other Essays. 1 volume. 12mo. Pages 

304. Price 1 75 

WORDS, THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 

1 volume. 12mo. Pages 384. Price 2 00 

HOURS WITH MEN AND BOOKS. 

1 volume. 12mo. Pages 384. Price 2 00 

MONDAY -CHATS; A Selection from the 
" Causeries du Lundi"' of C.-A. Sainte-Beuve. 
with a Biographical and Critical Introduction by 
the Translator. 1 volume. 12mo. Pages 386. 
Price .- 2 00 

ORATORY AND ORATORS. 1 volume. 

12mo. Pages 450. Price 2 00 



ORATORY AND ORATORS. 



BY 



WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D, 

AUTHOR OF "GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 11 "THE GREAT CONTERSERS. 
"words: THEIR USE AND ABUSE,' 1 ETC. ETC. 



L'eloquence est le talent cTimprimer avec force, et de faire passer avec 
rapidite. dans Tame des autres le sentiment profond dont on est panetre. 

D'Alembert. 
Criticism is nearly useless, unless the critic quotes innumerable examples. 

David Hume. 







CHICAGO: 

S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY, 

1879. 



Copyright. 1878. 
By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 



, ^> 

| KNIGHT St. LEOKARD 



Donohue & Henneberry, Binders. Chicago. 



.<• 



PREFACE. 



IN saying that his object in writing this book has 
been to aid in awakening a fresh interest in oratory 
in this country, the author will probably provoke a smile 
from his readers. "What!' 1 he hears some one exclaim, 
"have we not an excess of public speakers already? Is not 
the flux de bouche, — which is said to be the epidemic of 
republics, — one of the greatest evils that can afflict a 
country? Does not Carlyle declare that ' silence is the 
eternal duty of man,' and that ' England and America 
are going to nothing but wind and tongue'?" In reply, 
we would say that we have no wish to let loose a fresh 
troop of shallow declaimers upon the country; on the 
contrary, we feel intensely the social misery which a 
single declaim er, with a powerful memory, leathern lungs, 
and a fluent tongue, may inflict on the public. The Ro- 
man poet, Horace, speaks of one Novius, an office-holder 
at Rome, — a tribune, — who was elevated to the station 
he held, chiefly by the force of his lungs. " Has he not 
a voice," demanded his supporters, "loud enough to drown 
the noise of two hundred wagons and three funerals 
meeting in the forum? It is this that pleases us, and 
we have therefore made him tribune: 

" 'At hie, si plostra ducenta 
Concurrantque foro tria funera, magna sonabit 
Cornua quod vincatque tubas: saltern tenet hoc. nos.' 1 ' 

We fear that the United States has more than one 
Novius who owes his seat in a state legislature, in Con- 



o 



*\Z 



IV PREFACE. 

gress, or even on the bench, to a similar qualification. 
But shall we, therefore, conclude that the study of oratory 
as an art should be discouraged? The very reverse, we 
think, is the just conclusion. 

It is an unpleasant conviction, which we wish the 
facts did not force upon us, that while there is plenty 
of "spouting," — of speaking, if one pleases, — in this coun- 
try, there is little oratory, and less eloquence. It is for 
the very reason that the American people are deluged by 
their public speakers with words, — it is because so many of 
those who assume to address them from the tribune and 
the platform remind us so unpleasantly of that bird of 
the parrot tribe whose tongue is longer than its whole 
boch T , — that we would call attention to, and most ear- 
nestly emphasize, the value of oratorical studies. It is 
because our young men do not realize that oratory is 
the weapon of an athlete, and can never be wielded effectu- 
ally by an intellectual and moral weakling, — because our 
colleges unintentionally give currency to this idea by 
devoting so insignificant a portion of time to exercises 
in elocution, — that so many persons are ready to afflict 
the public with " mouthfuls of spoken wind. 1 ' It is be- 
cause they consciously or unconsciously hold the pesti- 
lent notion that the finest productions of the mind are 
the fruits of sudden inspiration, the chance visitations of 
a fortunate moment, the flashings of intuition, that they 
are ready to mount the rostrum at the slightest provoca- 
tion and without any serious preparation. Let them 
once learn and deeply feel that the most infallible sign 
of genius is a prodigious capacity for hard work, and an 
intense conviction of its necessity; that no man ever has, 
or ever can be, a true orator without a long and severe 
apprenticeship to the art; that it not only demands con- 
stant, patient, daily practice in speaking and reading, but 



PREFACE. V 

a sedulous culture of the memory, the judgment and the 
fancy, — a ceaseless storing of the cells of the brain with 
the treasures of literature, history, and science, for its 
use, — that one might as well expect literally to com- 
mand the lightnings of the tempest without philosophy, 
as without philosophy to wield the lightnings of elo- 
quence, — and they will shrink from haranguing their 
fellow-men, except after a careful training and the most 
conscientious preparation. So far is it from being true 
that, if elocution and style were cultivated more, a tor- 
rent of empty declamation would be let loose upon the 
world, that we are confident the very opposite would be 
the result. Study and high appreciation of an art, by 
improving the taste, increase fastidiousness ; and hence- 
they are calculated to check, rather than to increase ' lo- 
quacity. 

Owing to the vast abundance of the materials, the pre- 
paration of this work, whatever its shortcomings, has been 
no easy task. Several chapters written for it, including 
one on Military Eloquence, and sketches of a number of 
orators (Curran, Sheil, Macaulay, Fisher Ames, and Wil- 
liam Wirt), have been excluded, to avoid making the 
volume too bulky. For the same and other reasons, only 
incidental notices have been given of living orators. It 
was the author's intention to give a list of the works he 
had consulted; but they are so numerous that he must 
content himself with a general acknowledgment of his in- 
debtedness to nearly all the writers on oratory, — for there 
are few good ones, he believes, whom he has neglected 
to examine. Especially, would he acknowledge his obli- 
gations to various articles on the subject in the leading 
English reviews and the "North American Review," and 
to several anonymous writers in magazines, by whose 
suggestions he has profited. For some interesting facts 



VI PREFACE. 

concerning American orators, he is indebted to Mr. E. G. 
Parker's work on the " Golden Age of American Oratory." 
That it will be easy for a logician to point out apparent 
contradictions in these pages the author is aware; but 
he believes it will be found that, as was said of another 
writer, the latchet of whose shoes he is not worthy to 
unloose, that these seeming contradictions are, in fact, 
only successive presentations of single sides of a truth, 
which, by their union, manifest completely to us its 
existence, and guide us to a perception of its nature. 
" No good writer, 1 ' says Dr. Bushnell, " who is occupied 
in simply expressing truth, is ever afraid of contradic- 
tions or inconsistencies in his language. It is nothing 
to him that a quirk of logic can bring him into an 
absurdity. There is no book that contains so many 
repugnances, or antagonistic forms, as the Bible." * 

Finally, to all persons interested in the subject here dis- 
cussed, and who do not believe with the author of " Lacon" 
that " oratory is the puffing and blustering spoilt child of 
a semi-barbarous age," or with General Grant, that the 
art of speech-making is one of little use, but agree with 
Luther that "he who can speak well is a man," and 
with Cicero that it is most glorious to excel men -in 
that in which men excel all other animals, this work is 
inscribed. 

* " God in Christ,' ' pp. 57, 69. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 
The Power and Influence of the Orator, 9 

CHAPTER II. 
Is Oratory a Lost Art? - - - 30 

CHAPTER III. 
Qualifications of the Orator, - 63 

CHAPTER IV. 
Qualifications of the Orator (continued), - - 103 

CHAPTER V. 
The Orator's Trials, 140 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Orator's Helps, ------ 161 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Tests of Eloquence, - 193 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Personalities in Debate, - - - - - 214 



yiii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IX. 
Political Orators: English, 226 

CHAPTER X. 
Political Orators: Irish. ----- 268 

CHAPTER XL 
Political Orators: American, - 301 

CHAPTER XII. 
Forensic Orators, ------- 346 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Pulpit Orators, -----.« 379 

CHAPTER XIV. 

A Plea for Oratorical Culture, - 407 

Index, --------- 447 



ORATORY AND ORATORS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 

TO estimate the degree in which the orator has influ- 
enced the world's history, would be a difficult task. 
It would be hardly too much to say that, since the dawn 
of civilization, the triumphs of the tongue have rivalled, 
if not surpassed, those of the sword. There is hardly any 
man, illiterate or educated, so destitute of sensibility that 
he is not charmed by the music of eloquent speech, even 
though it affect his senses rather than his mind and 
heart, and rouse his blood only as it is roused by the 
drums and trumpets of military bands. But when elo- 
quence is something more than a trick of art, or a juggle 
with words; when (it) has a higher aim than to tickle the 
ear, or to (charm the imagination as the sparkling eye 
and dazzling scales of the serpent enchant the hovering 
bird; when it has a higher inspiration than that which 
produces the " sounding brass and tinkling cymbal " of 
merely fascinating speech; when ( it is" armed with the 
thunderbolt of powerful thought, and winged with lofty 
feeling; when the electric current of sympathy is estab- 
lished, and the orator sends upon it thrill after thrill of 
sentiment and emotion, vibrating and pulsating to the 
sensibilities of his hearers, as if their very heart-strings 



10 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

were held in the grasp of his trembling fingers; when it 
strips those to whom it is addressed of their independ- 
ence, invests them with its own life, and makes them 
obedient to a strange nature, as the mighty ocean tides 
follow the path of the moon; when it divests men of 
their peculiar qualities and affections, and turns a vast 
multitude into one man, giving to them but one heart, 
one pulse, and one voice, and that an echo of the speak- 
er's, — then, indeed, it becomes not only a delight, but a 
power, and a power greater than kings or military chief- 
tains can command. 

The French philosopher, D'Alembert, goes so far as to 
say of eloquence, that " the prodigies which it often works, 
in the hands of a single man, upon an entire nation, are 
perhaps the most shining testimony of the superiority of 
one man over another"; and Emerson expresses a simi- 
lar opinion when he says that eloquence is " the appro- 
priate organ of the highest* personal energy." As there 
is no effort of the human mind which demands a rarer 
combination of faculties than does oratory in its loftiest 
flights, so there is no human effort which is rewarded 
with more immediate or more dazzling triumphs. The 
philosopher in his closet, the statesman in his cabinet, 
the general in the tented field, may produce more lasting 
effects upon human affairs, but their influence is both 
more slowly felt, and less intoxicating from the ascend- 
ancy it confers. The orator is not compelled to wait 
through long and weary years to reap the reward of his 
labors. His triumphs are instantaneous; they follow his 
efforts as the thunder-peal follows the lightning's flash. 
While he is in the very act of forming his sentences, his 
triumph is reflected from the countenances of his hearers, 



POWEK AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 11 

and is sounded from their lips. To stand up before a 
vast assembly composed of men of the most various call- 
ings, views, passions, and prejudices, and mould them at 
will; to play upon their hearts and minds as a master 
upon the keys of a piano; to convince their understand- 
ings by the logic, and to thrill their feelings by the art, 
of the orator; to see every eye watching his face, and 
every ear intent on the words that drop from his lips; 
to see indifference changed to breathless interest, and 
aversion to rapturous enthusiasm; to hear thunders of 
applause at the close of every period; to see the whole 
assembly animated by the feelings which in him are 
burning and struggling for utterance; and to think that 
all this is the creation of the moment, and has sprung 
instantaneously from his fieiy brain and the inspiration 
imparted to it by the circumstances of the hour; — this, 
perhaps, is the greatest triumph of which the human 
mind is capable, and that in which its divinity is most 
signally revealed. 

The. history of every country and of every age teems 
with the miracles wrought by this necromantic power. 
Eloquence, as every school-boy knows, was the master- 
spirit of both the great nations of antiquity, — Greece and 
Rome. It was not the fleets of Attica, though mighty, 
nor the valor of her troops, though unconquerable, that 
directed her destinies, but the words and gestures of the 
men who had the genius and the skill to move, to concen- 
trate, and to direct the energies and passions of a whole 
people, as though they were but one person. When the 
Commons of Rome were bowed down to the dust beneath 
the load of debts which they owed their patrician creditors, 
it was the agonizing appeals of an old man in rags, pale 



12 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

and famishing, with haggard beard and hair, who told the 
citizens that he had fought in eight and twenty battles, and 
yet had been imprisoned for a debt with usurious interest 
which he was compelled to contract, but could not pay, that 
caused a change of the laws, and a restoration to liberty of 
those who had been enslaved by their creditors. It was 
not, as it has been well said, the fate of Lucretia, but the 
gesture of Brutus waving abroad her bloody knife, and 
his long hidden soul bursting forth in terrible denuncia- 
tion, that drove out the Tarquin from Rome, overthrew 
the throne, and established the Republic. " It was a fa- 
ther's cries and prayers for vengeance, as he rushed from 
the dead body of Virginia, appealing to his countrymen, 
that roused the legions of the Tusculan camp to seize 
upon the Sacred Mount, and achieve another freedom. 
And when the Roman Empire was the world, and trophies 
from every people hung in her capitol, the orator, whether 
in the senate or in the comitia, shook oracles of the fate 
of nations from the folds of his mantle. 1 ' Plutarch tells 
us that Thucydides, when Archidamus, King of Sparta, 
asked him which was the best wrestler, Pericles or he. — 
replied: "When I throw him, he says he was never down, 
and persuades the very spectators to believe him." The 
Athenian populace, roused by the burning words of De- 
mosthenes, started up with one accord and one cry to 
march upon Philip; and the Macedonian monarch said of 
the orator who had baffled him, — on hearing a report of 
one of his orations, — " Had I been there, he would have 
persuaded me to take up arms against myself." We are 
told that such was the force of Cicero's oratory, that it 
not only confounded the audacious Cataline, and silenced 
the eloquent Hortensius, — not only deprived Curio of all 



! 



POWEK AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 13 

power of recollection, when he rose to oppose that great 
master of enchanting rhetoric, — but made even Caesar 
tremble, and, changing his determined purpose, acquit the 
man he had- resolved to condemn. It was not till the two 
champions of ancient liberty, Demosthenes and Cicero, were 
silenced, that the triumph of Despotism in Greece and 
Rome was complete. The fatal blow to Athenian greatness 
was the defeat by Antipater which drove Demosthenes to 
exile and to death; the deadly stroke at Roman freedom 
was that which smote off the head of Tully at Caieta. 

In the Dark Ages the earnest tones of a simple private 
man, who has left to posterity only his baptismal name, 
with the modest surname of Hermit, roused the nations 
to engage in the Crusades, drove back the victorious cres- 
cent, overthrew feudalism, emancipated the serfs, delivered 
the towns from the oppression of the barons, and changed 
the moral face of Europe. Two centuries later the voice 
of a solitary monk shook the Vatican, and emancipated half 
of Europe from the dominion of Papal Rome. In later 
ages the achievements of oratory have been hardly less 
potent. What reader of English history is not familiar 
with the story of that "lord of the silver bow," the ac- 
complished Bolingbroke, whom the Ministry, when they 
permitted him to return from exile, dared not permit to 
reenter Parliament, lest they should be pierced by his 
deadly shafts? Who can say what the cause of European, 
or even the world's history would have been, had the 
British Senate never shaken with the thunders of Fox's, 
Camden's, or Grattan's eloquence, or had Mirabeau, Ver- 
gniaud, Louvet, Barbaroux, and Danton never hurled their 
fiery bolts from the French tribune? "Who can doubt," 
says Daniel Webster, "that in our own struggle for inde- 



14 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

pendence, the majestic eloquence of Chatham, the profound 
reasoning of Burke, the burning satire and irony of Bar re, 
had influence on our fortunes in America? They tended 
to diminish the confidence of the British ministry in their 
hopes to subject us. There was not a reading man who 
did not struggle more boldly for his rights when those 
exhilarating sounds, uttered in the two houses of Parlia- 
ment, reached him across the seas.' 1 To the effects wrought 
by " the fulminating eloquence " of the first of these great 
orators, history has borne abundant testimony. The arbi- 
ter of the destinies of his own country, he was also the 
foremost man in all the world. " His august mind over- 
awed majesty. . . . Without dividing, he destroyed party; 
without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous; 
France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the 
House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy 
of England.' 1 

We are told that when Mirabeau arose in the National 
Assembly, and delivered one of those fiery speeches which, 
in their union of reason and passion, so remind us of 
Demosthenes, he trod the tribune with the supreme au- 
thority of a master, and the imperial air of a king. As 
he proceeded with his harangue, his frame -dilated; his 
face was wrinkled and contorted; he roared, he stamped; 
his hair whitened with foam ; his whole system was seized 
with an electric irritability, and writhed as under an al- 
most preternatural agitation. The effect of his eloquence, 
which was of the grandest and most impressive kind, 
abounding in bold images, striking metaphors, and sud- 
den natural bursts, the creation of the moment, was 
greatly increased by his " hideously magnificent aspect," 
— the massive frame, the features full of pock-holes and 



POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 15 

blotches, the eagle eye that dismayed with a look, the 
voice of thunder that dared a reply, the hair that waved 
like a lion's mane. The ruling spirit of the French Revo- 
lution, he did, while he lived, more than any other man, 
"to guide the whirlwind and direct the storm" of that 
political and social crisis. When the clergy and the no- 
bles obeyed the royal mandate that the National Assem- 
bly should disperse, and the commons remained hesitat- 
ing, uncertain, almost in consternation, it was his voice 
that hurled defiance at the King, and inspired the Tiers- 
Etat with courage. When he cried out to the astonished 
emissary of Lewis: "Slave, go tell your master that we 
are here by the will of the people, and that we will de- 
part only at the point of the bayonet!" the words 
sounded like a thunder-clap to all Europe, and from that 
moment the bondage of the nation was broken, and the 
fate of despotism sealed.* Startling the critics of the 
Academy by his bold, straight-forward style of oratory, so 
opposed to the stiff, conventional manner of the day, he 
showed them that there was " a power of life " in his 
rude and startling language, — that the most common- 
place ideas could be endowed with electric power; and, 
had he not died prematurely, he might, perhaps, have 
dissuaded France from plunging into the gulf of anar- 
chy, and shown a genius for reconstruction only inferior 
to that which he had displayed as a destroyer. 

Among the most memorable displays of oratory, few 
are more familiar to the ordinary reader than those which 
took place during the trial of Warren Hastings in West- 
minster Hall. It is said that when Burke, with an im- 

* It is pretty certain that the language actually used by Mirabeau was less 
terse and audacious than this : we give the current version. 



16 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

agination almost as oriental as the scenes he depicted, 
described, in words that will live as long as the English 
language, the cruelties inflicted upon the natives of India 
by Debi Sing, one of Hastings's agents, a convulsive shud- 
der ran through the whole assembly. Indignation and 
rage filled the breasts of his hearers; some of the ladies 
"swooned away"; and Hastings himself, though he had 
protested his innocence, was utterly overwhelmed. " For 
half an hour," he said afterward in describing the scene, 
" I looked up at the orator in a revery of wonder, and 
actually felt myself to be the most culpable man on 
earth." — When Canning, in 1826, closed his famous speech 
on the King's Message respecting Portugal with the mem- 
orable passage: "I looked to Spain in the Indies; I called 
a New World into existence to redress the balance of the 
Old," the effect, we are told, was terrific. The whole 
House was moved as if an electric shock had passed 
through them: they all rose for a moment to look at 
him ! 

A memorable example of the power of eloquence is 
furnished by the speech of Lord Stanley (afterward the 
Earl of Derby) on the Irish Coercion Bill, brought into the 
House of Commons in 1833. O'Connell had made a pow- 
erful speech in opposition, and seemed, says Lord Rus- 
sell (to whom we are indebted for an account of the 
scene), about to achieve a triumph in favor of sedition 
and anarchy. Lord Derby, in his reply, recalled to the 
recollection of the House of Commons that, at a recent 
public meeting, O'Connell had spoken of the House of 
Commons as 658 scoundrels. "In a tempest of scorn 
and indignation," says Lord Russell, "he excited the an- 
ger of the men thus designated against the author of 



POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 17 

the calumny. The House which for two hours before 
seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was now al- 
most ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst of the 
storm which his eloquence had raised, he (Lord Stanley) 
sat down, having achieved one of the greatest triumphs 
of eloquence ever won in a popular assembly by the pow- 
ers of oratory." 

In our own country the triumphs of eloquence have 
been hardly less marked than those of the Old World. 
In the night of tyranny the eloquence of the country first 
blazed up, like the lighted signal-fires Of a distracted 
border, to startle and enlighten the community. Every- 
where, as the news of some fresh invasion of liberty and 
right was borne on the wings of the wind, men ran to- 
gether and called upon some earnest citizen to address 
them. The eloquence of that period was not the mere 
ebullition of feeling; it was the enthusiasm of reason; it 
was judgment raised into transport, and breathing the 
irresistible ardors of sympathy. 

When in 1761 James Otis, in a Boston popular assem- 
bly, denounced the British Writs of Assistance, his hearers 
were hurried away resistlessly on the torrent of his im- 
petuous speech. When he had concluded, every man, we 
are told, of the vast audience went away resolved to take up 
arms against the illegality. When Patrick Henry pleaded 
the tobacco case "against the parsons" in 1758, it is said 
that the people might have been seen in every part of the 
house, on the benches, in the aisles, and in the windows, 
hushed in death-like stillness, and bending eagerly for- 
ward to catch the magic tones of the speaker. The jury 
were so bewildered as to lose sight of the legislative enact- 
ments on which the plaintiffs relied; the court lost the 
1* 



18 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

equipoise of its judgment, and refused a new trial; and 
the people, who could scarcely keep their hands off their 
champion after he had closed his harangue, no sooner saw 
that he was victorious, than they seized him at the bar, 
and, in spite of his own efforts, and the continued cry of 
"Order!" from the sheriff and the court, bore him out of 
the court-house, and, raising him on their shoulders, car- 
ried him about the yard in a kind of electioneering tri- 
umph. When the same great orator concluded his well- 
known speech in March, 1775, in behalf of American 
independence, " no murmur of applause followed," says 
his biographer; "the effect was too deep. After the trance 
of a moment, several members of the Assembly started 
from their seats. The cry, To arms! seemed to quiver 
on every lip and glance from every eye." — Mr. Jefferson, 
who drew up the Declaration of Independence, declares 
that John Adams, its ablest advocate on the floor of Con- 
gress, poured forth his passionate appeals in language 
" which moved his hearers from their seats." 

There are few school-boys who are not familiar with 
the famous passage in the great speech of Fisher Ames 
on the British Treaty, in which he depicts the horrors of 
the border war with the Indians, which would result from 
its rejection. Even when we read these glowing periods 
to-day in cold blood, without the tremulous and thrilling 
accents of the dying statesman, that made them so im- 
pressive, we feel the " fine frenzy " of the speaker in every 
line. An old man, a judge in Maine, who heard the burn- 
ing words of Ames, declared that as he closed with the 
climax, "The darkness of midnight will glitter with the 
blaze of your dwellings. You are a father, — the blood of 
your sons shall fatten your corn-field : you are a mother, — 



POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 19 

thp war-whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle," — the 
pwophecy seemed for a moment a reality. " I shuddered 
■'and'" -..looked a little behind me; for I fancied a big Indian 
with an uplifted tomahawk over me." 

William Wirt, himself an orator, tells us that when 
the "Blind Preacher of Virginia" drew a picture of the 
trial, crucifixion, and death of our Savior, there was such 
force and pathos in the description that the original scene 
appeared to be, at that moment, acting before the hearers' 
eyes. "We saw the very faces of the Jews: the staring, 
frightful distortions of malice and rage. We saw the 
buffet; my soul kindled with a flame of indignation: and 
my hands were involuntarily and convulsively clinched." 
But when, with faltering voice, he came to touch on the 
patience, the forgiving meekness of the Savior, his prayer 
for pardon of his enemies, " the effect was inconceivable. 
The whole house resounded with the mingled groans, and 
sobs, and shrieks of the congregation." 

The accounts given of the effects wrought by some of 
Daniel Webster's speeches, seem almost incredible to those 
who never have listened to his clarion-like voice and 
weighty words. Yet even now, as we read some of the 
stirring passages in his early discourses, we can hardly 
realize that we are not standing by as he strangles the 
reluctantes dracones of an adversary, or actually looking 
upon the scenes in American history which he so vividly 
describes. Prof. Ticknor, speaking in one of his letters 
of the intense excitement with which he listened to Web- 
ster's Plymouth Address, says: "Three or four times I 
thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood; 
for, after all, you must know that I am aware it is no 
connected and compacted whole, but a collection of won- 



20 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

derful fragments of burning eloquence, to which his man- 
ner gave tenfold force. When I came out, I was almost 
afraid to come near to Mm. It seemed to me that he was 
like the mount that might not be touched, and that burned 
with fire." 

As it was the eloquence of Hamilton, spoken and writ- 
ten, which, in no small degree, established our political 
system, so it was the eloquence of Webster that mainly 
defended and saved it: — 

" Duo fulmina belli, 
Scipiadas, cladem Libyae.' 1 

When the Federal Constitution, the product of so much 
sacrifice and toil, was menaced by the Nullifiers of 
South Carolina, it was the great orator of Massachusetts 
that sprang to its rescue. As the champion of New Eng- 
land closed the memorable peroration of his reply to 
Hayne, the silence of death rested upon the crowded 
Senate Chamber. Hands remained clasped, faces fixed 
and rigid, and eyes tearful, while the sharp rap of the 
President's hammer could hardly awaken the audience 
from the trance into which the orator had thrown them. 
When, again, over thirty years later, Nullification once 
more raised its front, and stood forth armed for a long 
and desperate conflict, it was the ignited logic of the 
same Defender of the Constitution, — the burning and en- 
thusiastic appeals for "Liberty and Union, now and for- 
ever, one and inseparable," — which, still echoing in the 
memories of the people, roused them as by a bugle-blast 
to resistance. It was because Webster, when living, had 
indoctrinated the whole North with his views of the 
structure of our government, that, when his bones lay 
mouldering at Marshfield, the whole North was ready to 



POWEK AND INFLUENCE OF THE OKATOR. 21 

fight as one man against the heresy of Secession. The 
idol of the American youth, at the stage of their culture 
when eloquence exerts its most powerful fascination, he 
had infused into their hearts such a sentiment of nation- 
ality, that they sprang to arms with a determination to 
shed the last drop of their blood, rather than see a single 
star effaced from the ample folds of the national flag. 
Who has forgotten the potent enchantment worked by 
the same voice in Faneuil Hall, after the odious Com- 
promise Act of 1850? The orator who had been adored 
as " godlike," and whose appearance had been a signal 
for a universal outburst of enthusiasm, — the orator upon 
whom New England had been proud to lavish its honors, 
was now received with frowning looks and sullen indig- 
nation; yet "never," says the poet Lowell, "did we en- 
counter a harder task than to escape the fascination of 
that magnetic presence of the man, which worked so po- 
tently to charm the mind from a judicial serenity to an 
admiring enthusiasm. There he stood, the lion at bay; 
and that one man, with his ponderous forehead, his 
sharp, cliff-edged brows, his brooding, thunderous eyes, 
his Mirabeau mane of hair, and all the other nameless 
attributes of his lion-like port, seemed enough to over- 
balance and outweigh that great multitude of men, who 
came as accusers, but remained, so to speak, as captives, 
swayed to and fro by his aroused energy as the facile 
grain is turned hither and thither in mimic surges by 
the strong wind that runs before the thundergust." 

With the triumphs of sacred oratory it would be easy 
to fill a volume. Not to go back to the days of John 
the Baptist, or to those of Paul and Peter, whose words 
are the very flame-breath of the Almighty, — nor even to 



22 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

the days of Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, who, when, 
like another Elijah, or John the Baptist risen from the 
dead, he reappeared among his townsmen of Antioch, 
after the austerities in the desert to which his disgust at 
their licentiousness had driven him, denounced their bac- 
chanalian orgies in words that made their cheeks tingle, 
and sent them panic-stricken to their homes, — who is 
not familiar with the miracles which christian eloquence 
has wrought in modern times? ~Who has forgotten the 
story of " the priest, patriot, martyr," Savonarola, crying 
evermore to the people of Florence, "Heu! fuge crudelas 
terras, fuge littus avarum! " Who is ignorant of the mighty 
changes, ecclesiastic and political, produced by the blunt 
words of Latimer, the fiery appeals of Wycliffe, the stern 
denunciations of Knox? Or what ruler of men ever sub- 
jugated them more effectually by his sceptre than Chal- 
mers, who gave law from his pulpit for thirty years; who 
hushed the frivolity of the modern Babylon, and melted the 
souls of the French philosophers in a half-known tongue; 
who drew tears from dukes and duchesses, and made 
princes of the blood and bishops start to their feet, and 
break out into rounds of the wildest applause? 

What cultivated man needs to be told of the sweet 
persuasion that dwelt upon the tongue of the swan 
of Cambray, the alternating religious joy and terror in- 
spired by the silvery cadence and polished phrase of 
Massillon, or the resistless conviction that followed the 
argumentative strategy of Bourdaloue, — a mode of attack 
upon error and sin which w T as so illustrative of the imper- 
atoria virtus of Quintilian, that the great Conde cried out 
once, as the Jesuit mounted the pulpit, " Silence, Messiews, 
void Vennemi!" What schoolboy is not familiar with the 



POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 23 

religious terror with which, in his oraisons funebres, the 
" Demosthenes of the pulpit," Bossuet, thrilled the breasts 
of seigneurs and princesses, and even the breast of that 
King before whom other kings trembled and knelt, when, 
taking for his text the words, " Be wise, therefore, ye 
kings! be instructed, ye judges of the earth! 1 ' he un- 
veiled to his auditors the awful reality of God the Lord 
of all empires, the chastiser of princes, reigning above 
the heavens, making and unmaking kingdoms, principal- 
ities and powers; or, again, with the fire of a lyric poet 
and the zeal of a prophet, called on nations, princes, no- 
bles, and warriors, to come to the foot of the catafalque 
which strove to raise to heaven a magnificent testimony 
of the nothingness of man? At the beginning of his dis- 
courses, the action of " the eagle of Meaux," we are told, 
was dignified and reserved; he confined himself to the 
notes before him. Gradually " he warmed with his theme, 
the contagion of his enthusiasm seized his hearers; he 
watched their rising emotion; the rooted glances of a 
thousand eyes filled him with a sort of divine frenzy; his 
notes became a burden and a hindrance; with impetuous 
ardor he abandoned himself to the inspiration of the mo- 
ment; with the eyes of the soul he watched the swelling 
hearts of his hearers; their concentrated emotions became 
his own; he felt within himself the collected might of 
the orators and martyrs whose collected essence, by long 
and repeated communion, he had absorbed into himself; 
from flight to flight he ascended, until, with unflagging 
energy, he towered straight upwards, and dragged the 
rapt contemplation of his audience along with him in its 
ethereal flight." At such times, says the Abbe Le Dieu, 
it seemed as though the heavens were open, and celestial 



24 ORATORY AtfD ORATORS. 

joys were about to descend upon these trembling souls, 
like tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost. At other 
times, heads bowed down with humiliation, or pale up- 
turned faces and streaming eyes, lips parted with broken 
ejaculations of despair, silently testified that the spirit of 
repentance had breathed on many a hardened heart. 

There is a story told of a French Abbe, that he preached 
a sermon, on a certain Sunday, of such power that his 
appalled people went home, put up the shutters of their 
shops, and for three days gave themselves up to utter de- 
spair. Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinistic divine, preached 
sermons of such force that, under the lash of his -fiery 
denunciation, men cried out in agony, and women rose up 
in their seats. There have been other preachers who, in 
moments of general misery, have had equal power of turn- 
ing the wailing of their people into bursts of thankfulness 
and joy. "I have heard it reported," says Emerson, "of 
an eloquent preacher whose voice is not forgotten in this 
city (Boston), that, on occasions of death or tragic disaster 
which overspread the congregation with gloom, he ascended 
the pulpit with more than his usual alacrity, and, turning 
to his favorite lessons of devout and jubilant thankful- 
ness, — 'Let us praise the Lord,' — carried audience, mourn- 
ers, and mourning along with him, and swept away all the 
impertinence of private sorrow with his hosannas and 
songs of praise." 

In our own day the triumphs of eloquence, though of 
a different kind from those of yore, are hardly less signal 
than in the ages past. We doubt, on the whole, if the 
orator was ever tempted by brighter laurels, or had a 
grander field for the exercise of his art. "We live in an 
age of popular agitation, when, in every free country, the 



POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 25 

people are becoming more and more the source of all 
power, and when it is by organized and systematic effort, — 
by " monster meetings," and appeals made to the constit- 
uencies of the country, rather than to the legislature, — 
that great political changes are worked out. The germs of 
great events, the first motive-springs of change, have their 
origin, no doubt, in the closet, in the brains of men of 
deep thought and wide observation, who are not engaged 
in the strife and turmoil of the arena. But the people 
are the great agency by which all revolutions and changes 
are accomplished, and the two great engines for convincing 
and moving the people are oratory and the press. Never 
before were the masses of the people appealed to so ear- 
nestly and systematically as now. The title, "Agitator," 
once a term of contempt, has now become one of honor. 
Look at England! What mighty changes have been 
wrought in her political system within the last fifty years 
by the indomitable energy of the Vincents, the Foxes, the 
Cobdens, and scores of other speakers, who have traversed 
the kingdom, advocating Parliamentary Reform, the Repeal 
of the Corn-Laws, and other measures which were once 
deemed Utopian and hopeless! Scotland, too, has hardly 
yet recovered from a convulsion which shook society to its 
foundations, produced by the eloquence of a few earnest 
men, who declared that "conscience should be free." Who 
can doubt that, in our own country, it was the vehement 
and impassioned oratory of the so-called "anti-slavery 
fanatics," — the "hare-brained" champions of "the higher 
law," — that precipitated the "irrepressible conflict" which 
broke the fetters of the slave, and thus removed the most 
formidable obstacle to the complete union of North and 

South, as well as the foulest stain on our escutcheon? 

2 



26 ORATORY AND ORATORo. 

It is natural to associate the gift of eloquence with a 
few favored lands, and to imagine, especially, that civilized 
communities only have felt its influence. But there is no 
people, except the very lowest savages, to whom it has been 
denied. There is, doubtless, a vast difference between the 
voice of an untutored peasant, who never thought of the 
magic potency dwelling in this faculty, and who, conse- 
quently, addresses his fellows in loud and discordant tones, 
and that of the man who, with an educated mind and a 
cultivated taste, understands and uses his voice as Handel 
understood and used the organ; yet there are examples of 
eloquence in the speeches of Logan and Red Jacket, and 
other aborigines of America, that will live in the story of 
that abused race as long as the trees wave in their forests, 
or the winds sigh among their mountains. Sir Francis 
Head, in narrating the proceedings of a council of Bed 
Indians which he attended as Governor of Canada, says: 
" Nothing can be more interesting, or offer to the civilized 
world a more useful lesson, than the manner in which the 
red aborigines of America, without ever interrupting each 
other, conduct their councils. The calm dignity of their 
demeanor, — the scientific manner in which they progress- 
ively construct the framework of whatever subject they 
undertake to explain, — the sound argument by which they 
connect, as well as support it, — and the beautiful wild- 
flowers of eloquence with which they adorn every portion 
of the moral architecture they are constructing, — form 
altogether an exhibition of grave interest; and yet these 
orators are men whose lips and gums are, while they are 
speaking, black from the berries on which they subsist." 

As we conclude this chapter, a sad thought presses it- 
self upon the mind touching that eloquence whose magic 



POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 27 

effects we have so faintly depicted; it is that it is so per- 
ishable. Of all the great products of creative art, it is 
the only one that does not survive the creator. We read 
a discourse which is said to have enchanted all who 
heard it, and how "shrunken and wooden" do we find 
its image, compared with the conception we had formed! 
The orator who lashed himself into a foam, — whose speech 
drove on in a fiery sleet of words and images, — now 
seems 

"Dull as the lake that slumbers in the storm," 

and we can scarcely credit the reports of his frenzy. 
The picture from the great master's hand may improve 
with age; every year may add to the mellowness of its 
tints, the delicacy of its colors. The Cupid of Praxiteles, 
the Mercury of Thorwaldsen, are as perfect as when they 
came from the sculptor's chisel. The dome of Saint 
Peter's, the self-poised roof of King's Chapel, " scooped 
into ten thousand cells," the facade and sky-piercing 
spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, are a perpetual memorial 
of the genius of their builders. Even music, so far as it 
is a creation of the composer, may live forever. The aria 
or cavatina may have successive resurrections from its 
dead signs. The delicious melodies of Schubert, and even 
Handel's " seven-fold chorus of hallelujahs and harping 
symphonies," may be reproduced by new artists from age 
to age. But oratory, in its grandest or most bewitching 
manifestations, — the detvorsq of Demosthenes, contending 
for the crown, — the white heat of Cicero inveighing 
against Antony, — the glaring eye and thunder tones of 
Chatham denouncing the employment of Indians in war, 
— the winged flame of Curran blasting the pimps and 
informers that would rob Orr of his life, — the nest of 



28 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

singing-birds in Prentiss's throat, as he holds spell-bound 
the thousands in Faneuil Hall, — the look, port, and voice 
of Webster, as he hurls his thunderbolts at Hayne, — all 
these can no more be reproduced than the song of the 
sirens. 

The words of a masterpiece of oratorical genius may be 
caught by the quick ear of the reporter, and jotted down 
with literal exactness, not a preposition being out of 
place, not an interjection wanting; but the attitude and 
the look, the voice and the gesture, are lost forever. As 
well might you attempt to paint the lightning's flash, as 
to paint the piercing glance which, for an instant, from 
the great orator's eyes, darts into your very soul, or to 
catch the mystic, wizard tones, which now bewitch you 
with their sweetness, and now storm the very citadel of 
your mind and senses. Occasionally a great discourse is 
delivered, which seems to preserve in print some of the 
chief elements of its power. In reading Bossuet's thrill- 
ing sermon on the death of Madame Henriette Anne 
d'Angleterre, we seem to be almost living in the seven- 
teenth century, and to hear the terrible cry which rings 
through the halls of Versailles, — "Madame se meurt! 
Madame est mortel" and to see the audience sobbing 
with veiled faces as the words are pronounced. But, in 
the vast majority of cases, it is but a caput mortuum 
which the most cunning stenographer can give us of that 
which, in its utterance, so startled or charmed the 
hearer. The aroma, the finer essences, have vanished, — 
only the dead husk remains. Again, eloquence, as Pitt 
said, "is in the assembly," and therefore to appreciate a 
discourse, we must not only have heard it as delivered, 
but when and where it was delivered, with all its accom- 



POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR. 29 

paniments, and with the temper of those to whom it was 
addressed. We need the " fiery life of the moment," the 
contagion of the great audience, the infectious enthusi- 
asm leaping from heart to heart, the shouting thousands 
in the echoing minster or senate. We need to see and 
to hear the magician with his wand in his hand, and on 
the theatre of his spells. The country preacher, there- 
fore, was right, who, when he had electrified his people 
by an extempore discourse preached during a thunder- 
storm, and was asked to let them print it, replied that 
he would do so if they would print the thunder-storm 
along 1 with it. 



CHAPTER II. 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART 



TN the last chapter we expressed the opinion that the 
-*- triumphs of eloquence in our own day, though of a 
different kind from those of yore, are not less signal than 
in the ages past. We are aware that many persons in 
England and America, — especially the croakers, laudatores 
temporis acti, and believers in the fabled "golden ages" of 
excellence, — will deny this statement. Talk to them of the 
eloquent tongues of the present day, — tell them how you 
have been thrilled by the music of Gladstone's or Everett's 
periods, or startled by the thunderbolts of Webster, 
Brougham, or Bright, — and they will tell you, with a sigh, 
that the oratory of their predecessors was grander and 
more impressive. The golden age of oratory, they say, has 
gone, and the age of iron has succeeded. It is an era 
of tare and tret, of buying and selling, of quick returns 
and small profits, and we have no time or taste for fine 
phrases. If we have perfected the steam-engine, and in- 
vented the electric telegraph and the phonograph, we have 
also enthroned a sordid, crouching, mammon-worshipping 
spirit in high places; we have deified dullness, and idol- 
ized cotton-spinning and knife-grinding, till oratory, which 
always mirrors the age, has become timid and formal, dull 
and decorous, never daring or caring to soar in eagle 
flights, but content to creep on the ground, and "dwell 
in decencies forever." Hence we have no masterpieces of 

30 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 31 

eloquence to-day like those with which Demosthenes, or 
Chatham, or Mirabeau, awed and overwhelmed their hear- 
ers. We have no speeches of marrow and pith, abounding 
in great truths felicitously expressed, terse, epigrammatic 
sentences, that stick like barbed arrows in the memory, and 
magnificent metaphors which only genius can coin. We 
have plenty of able debaters, but no real orators, — no men 
" on whose tongue the fiery touch of eloquence has been 
laid, whose lips the Attic bees have stung with intensity 
and power." Go to the home of oratory, France, and you 
will hear the same melancholy plaint. A late French 
writer, mourning over the decay of eloquence in his native 
land, declares that the present Chambers are but so many 
little chapels, where each one places his own image upon 
the altar, chants magnificats, and pays adoration to himself. 
The deputies, devoured with the leprosy of political mate- 
rialism, are but manikins, not men. Deputies of a parish 
or a fraternity; deputies of a harbor, of a railroad, of a 
canal, of a vineyard; deputies of sugar-cane or beet-root; 
deputies of oil or of bitumen; deputies of charcoal, of salt, 
of iron, of flax; deputies of bovine, equine, asinine inter- 
ests, — in short, of everything except of France, they repre- 
sent but obsolete opinions, and are never heard of beyond 
the range of their own voice.* 

In every age we hear these doleful Jeremiads; evermore 
the cry of the present is, "there were giants in those days." 
We are all more or less the victims of that illusion which 
leads men to idealize and idolize the past. It seems almost 
impossible for a man who has reached fifty to escape that 
senile querulousness which leads one to magnify the merits 
of dead actors and singers, sculptors and painters, and 

* k * The Orators of France." 



32 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

other artists of lang syne. " Memory's geese are always 
swans.' 1 We all fancy with the old Count in Gil Bias, that 
the peaches were much larger when we were boys. Burke, 
who, we think, lived in an age of giants, spoke of it as an 
age of comparative dwarfs. There are persons who go even 
farther than the victims of this hereditary illusion ; who not 
only claim for the orators of past centuries, — and especially 
for those of Greece and Rome, — an immeasurable superior- 
ity over those of the present age, but do not hesitate even 
to assert that orator} 7 is now almost a lost art. The age 
of great orators, they say, has gone by, and such have 
been the changes in society, and in the modes of influ- 
encing public opinion, that the Cicero or Demosthenes of 
antiquity is no more likely to return than the rhapsodist 
of early Greece or the Troubadour of romance. Just as 
the improved artillery, the revolver, and the repeating 
rifle, have rendered swords, sabres, and bayonets cumbrous 
and useless, so the old-fashioned formal harangues of the 
British and American senates have given way to the brief, 
business-like speeches of modern times. 

That many plausible reasons may be urged for this 
belief, we are ready to admit. Oratory, like satire, is fed 
by the vices and misfortunes of society. Long periods of 
peace and prosperity, which quicken the growth of other 
arts, are in some respects fatal to it. Its element is the 
whirlwind and the storm; and when society is upheaved 
to its foundations, when the moral and political darkness 
is thickest, it shines forth with the greatest splendor. As 
the science of medicine would be useless among a people 
free from disease, so if there were a Utopia in the world 
free from crimes and disputes, from commotions and dis- 
turbances, there would be no demand for oratory. As 



IS ORATORY A kOST ART? 33 

Tacitus, (or whoever else was the author of the dialogue 
on the " Corruptions of Oratory,") has observed, peace, 
no doubt, is preferable to war, but it is the latter only 
that forms the soldier. "It is just the same with elo- 
quence; the oftener she enters, if I may so say, the field 
of battle; the more wounds she gives and receives; the 
more powerful the adversary with which she contends, — 
so much the more ennobled she appears in the eye of 
mankind." 

It is a significant coincidence that the period when 
Athenian oratory was at its height was the period when 
the Athenian character and the Athenian empire were 
sunk to the lowest point of degradation. Before the Per- 
sian wars, and while she was achieving those victories 
which have made the world ring with her name, the elo- 
quence of Athens was in its infancy. At length the crisis 
came. Disunion crept into her councils; her provinces 
revolted; her tributaries insulted her; her fleets, which 
had won such dazzling triumphs over the barbarians, fled 
before the enemy; her armies, which had so long been 
invincible, pined in the quarries of Syracuse, or fed the 
vultures of iEgospotami; the sceptre passed from her 
hand, and the sons of the heroes who fought at Marathon 
were forced to bow to the yoke of a Macedonian king. 
It was now, when the sun of her material prosperity was 
setting, — when her moral, political, and military character 
was most degraded, — when the viceroy of a foreign despot 
was giving law to her people, and she was draining the 
cup of suffering to its very dregs, — that was seen the 
splendid dawn of an eloquence such as the world never 
since has known. 

The history of Roman eloquence differs in no essential 



34 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

particular from that of Greece. It was not in the days 
of the Scipios, of Cincinnatus, and of the Gracchi, that 
Cicero thundered and Hortensius flashed. It was when 
"the Eternal City" was convulsed by dissensions, and torn 
by faction; when the plebeians were arrayed against the 
patricians, and the patricians against the plebeians; when 
demagogues and assassins overawed the courts, and the 
magistrates despaired of the public safety, — that were heard 
the accents of that oratory which has linked the name of 
Cicero with that of the conqueror of iEschines. It was 
out of the crimes of Catiline, and the outrages of Verres 
and Mark Antony, that sprang the loftiest eloquence that 
shook the Roman Senate, as it was the galling tyranny of 
Philip that set on fire the genius of Demosthenes. 

Again, besides the revolutionary atmosphere, there was 
another circumstance which in the ancient states stimu- 
lated the growth of eloquence, — namely, the simplicity of 
public business, as compared with its vast extent, com- 
plexity, and fullness of details, in modern times. Living, 
in the days of their luxury, by the spoliation of foreign 
states, instead of by the labor of their own hands, the 
citizens had leisure for the consideration of public ques- 
tions, which were generally of the simplest kind. Peace 
or war, vengeance for public wrongs, or mercy to pros- 
trate submission, national honor and national gratitude, 
— -topics appealing to the primal sensibilities of man, — 
were, as De Quincey has observed, the themes of Greek 
and Roman oratory. The speeches of Demosthenes and 
the other great orators of antiquity were the expressions 
of intense minds on subjects of the deepest moment, and 
therefore the distinguishing feature of their oratory was 
vehemence. Speaking on questions upon whose decision 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 35 

hung the very existence of his country, the orator could 
not be expected to speak temperately; he could not be- 
lieve that there were two sides to the question, and that 
conflicting views were equally reconcilable with patriot- 
ism in those who held them. To-day the circumstances 
in which the parliamentary orator is placed are entirely 
different. The legislative assemblies are deliberative 
bodies, that have grave and weighty business interests 
to deal with, and hard practical knots to untie. Nine- 
teen-twentieths of the business that comes before them 
is of a kind that affords no scope for eloquence. The 
multiplicity and detail of modern affairs, abounding in 
particulars and petty items, tend to stifle and suffocate it. 
Go into the British Parliament or the American Con- 
gress, and the theme of debate will be, — what? In all 
probability a road or a bridge bill, a bill to demonetize 
or to remonetize silver, a bill to subsidize a steamship 
or railway corporation, or to establish a new post-route. 
A man who should discuss these questions as if they 
were questions of life and death, would only make him- 
self a laughing-stock. Even in Queen Caroline's case the 
House of Lords barely refrained from laughing, when 
Brougham knelt to beseech the peers. The great major- 
ity of the questions that now come up for decision by our 
political assemblies turn on masses of fact, antecedents in 
blue-books, tabulated statistics, which all necessitate not 
only elaborate inquiries, but differences of opinion after 
the inquiries. The Demosthenic vehemence is, therefore, 
out of place. Ingenuity and skill, a happy facility of 
dealing with tangled and complicated facts, judgment, 
quickness, tact, — and, along with these, the calm, didac- 
tic exposition, the clear, luminous statement, a treatment 



36 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

nearly like that of the lecturer, — are more efficacious 
than the "sound and fury 1 ' of the ancient orator. The 
modern speaker feels that on points of detail it would be 
ridiculous to be in a passion, — that on matters of busi- 
ness it would be absurd to be enthusiastic; and hence, 
except on rare occasions, he deals in facts rather than in 
fancies, in figures of arithmetic rather than in figures of 
speech, in pounds, shillings, and pence, rather than in 
poetry. It was the opinion of Rufus Choate that even 
Clay and Webster, as they did not live in a revolution- 
ary age, missed the greatest agony of eloquence. As an- 
cient conversation was more or less oratorical, so modern 
oratory is more or less conversational in its tone. The 
cold, calculating, commercial spirit of the age jeers at 
fine speaking, and the shrewd speaker, therefore, suggests 
rather than elaborates, talks rather than declaims. The 
light touch of Peel, Palmerston, or Wendell Phillips, is 
more effective than the rounded periods of the formal 
rhetorician. 

The same difference extends to forensic eloquence. 
Mr. Forsyth, the author of " Hortensius," has justly as- 
cribed its decay in England to the excessive technicality 
which pervades the law. Nothing can be more fatal to 
eloquence than attention to the fine and hair-splitting 
distinctions which subtle pleaders delight to raise and 
pettifoggers to maintain, and to which the courts of jus- 
tice, both in Great Britain and the United States, are 
too prone to lend a ready ear. The overgrown mass, the/' 
huge, unwieldy body of the law at the present day, is 
another impediment to oratory, hardly less formidable. 
How can a man be eloquent whose best days and hours 
are spent in learning and digesting the enormous mass 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 37 

of statutes, with the myriad decisions upon them, which 
now fill the thousand volumes upon his shelves? Talents 
of a popular kind, the power of giving effect to large 
and comprehensive views, wither under such a treatment 
as this. The modern lawyer has no time to gather the 
flowers of Parnassus. All the fire, energy, and enthusi- 
asm of a young man with noble impulses, — all his native 
genius and acquired abilities, — die within him, overlaid 
and smothered by the forms and technicalities of a nar- 
row, crabbed, and barbarous legal system. 

On the other hand, Greek and Roman pleadings, in- 
stead of relating to technicalities, to the construction 
of a statute, or to facts of an intricate and perplexing 
nature, were occupied with questions of elementary jus- 
tice, large and diffusive, which even the uninstructed 
could understand, and which connected themselves at 
every step with powerful and tempestuous feelings. The 
judges, instead of being the mere interpreters of the law, 
were also legislators. Instead of being thwarted by the 
cold vigilance of justice or the restraining formalities of 
practice, — instead of being hampered by codes, or ob- 
structed by precedents, — the pleader appealed boldly to 
the passions and prejudices of his hearers. To obtain a 
verdict of guilt or innocence, by invective or by exaggera- 
tion, by appeals to public expediency or by appeals to 
private hate, was the only end which he proposed to him- 
self. It was the universal right of accusation, that spe- 
cies of magistracy with which each citizen was clothed 
for the protection of the common liberty, that produced 
under the Caesars those infamous denunciations, that lu- 
crative and sanguinary eloquence, lucrosam et sanguino- 
lentam eloquentiam, of which Tacitus speaks. 



38 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

In all the precepts given by the ancient orators there 
is supposed a violent, partial, unjust, and corrupt magis- 
trate who is to be won. A thousand scenes of tumult 
intermingled incessantly with the solemnities of justice. 
The forms and the place in which justice was adminis- 
tered; the character of the accusations, so often of a po- 
litical nature; the presence of the opposed parties; the 
throng of people present, — all excited and inspired the 
orator. A modern court-room has little resemblance to 
that public place in which were pronounced the decrees 
that abolished the royalties of Asia, where the honors of 
Rome were conferred, where laws were proposed and ab- 
rogated, and which was also the theatre of the great ju- 
dicial debates. The objective genius of antiquity, it has 
been well said, is nowhere more vividly illustrated than 
in its legal proceedings. "The contrast between the for- 
malities of the Old Bailey or Westminster Hall and those 
of the Areopagus or the Forum, could, if mutually wit- 
nessed, have produced in their respective audiences noth- 
ing but mutual repulsion. An Englishman can have but 
little sympathy with that sentimental justice that yields 
to the exposure of a beautiful bosom, and melts into 
tears at the sight of a bloody cloak or a gaping wound. 
A Roman or a Grecian, on the other hand, would have 
regarded with supreme disgust the impartial majesty of 
that stern judicature which saw unpitied the weeping 
children of Strafford, looked unmoved at the bleeding 
loins of Lilburne, and laughed aloud at the impassioned 
dagger of Burke." 

Again, not only was the stormy atmosphere of ancient 
states favorable to the development of eloquence, but the 
system of national education was adapted to the same 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 39 

end The only object to which it was apparently di- 
rected, was to create a breed of national orators. In the 
ages when the codes of law were comparatively simple, 
when every civil and political result depended on the art 
with which the public speaker mastered and impelled the 
minds of the audience or the judges, when in fack the 
orator was the most important political power m the 
state, the study and practice of oratory were more neces- 
sary than in epochs of more complex civilization; and 
hence ancient eloquence was more artistic, and demanded 
far more study than modern. It was, in fact, a fine art, 
— an art regarded by its cultivators and the public as 
analogous to sculpture, to poetry, to painting, to music, 
and to acting. The greatest care, therefore, was taken 
that children should, first of all, acquire the language in 
the utmost purity, and that an inclination to the forum 
should be among their earliest and strongest preferences. 
It was not by bending painfully over dog's-eared volumes 
that the Athenian boy gained most of his knowledge. It 
was by listening to oral discussion, by hearing the great 
orators speak from the bema, by hearkening to the sages 
and philosophers in the groves of the Academy, by fol- 
lowing the rhapsodists in the streets, or seeing the plays 
of iEschylus and Sophocles in the tL^tre, that the Athe- 
nian citizen was intellectually trained and instructed. It 
was from all these sources, but especially from the early 
habit of engaging in public discussion, that he derived 
that fertility of resource, that copiousness of language, 
and that knowledge of the temper and understanding of 
an audience, which, as Macaulay has remarked, are far 
more valuable to an orator than the greatest logical 
powers. 



40 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Again, modern oratory has been powerfully influenced 
by the printing-press, and by the great extension of knowl- 
edge which it has caused. When the only way of address- 
ing the public was by orations, and all public measures 
were debated in popular assemblies, the characters of Ora- 
tor, Author, Politician, and Editor, almost entirely coin- 
cided. Among the ancients, it must be remembered, there 
was no Press and no representative system of government. 
Owing to the small territorial area of each state, and the 
limited numbers of the free population, each citizen was 
expected to attend in person at the great popular assem- 
blies, where state matters were debated; and so great was 
the importance which was attached to these debates, that, 
among the Greeks, the word \artfopia, which etymologically 
means "equality of rights in debate," was employed as 
synonymous with iaovoiua, which was used to express 
" equality in the eye of the law." Indeed, Demosthenes 
himself, when, in one of his orations, he would vividly 
contrast democratic states like Athens with oligarchies 
and tyrannies, represents his count^men as "those whose 
government is based on speaking." In times of public 
excitement, a great speech was a great dramatic politico- 
national event, and multitudes in Athens and Rome were 
drawn to the bema and the rostrum by the same instincts 
that now lead them to crowd to the news-room, and devour 
the leading articles and the latest news by electric tele- 
graph. Demosthenes and Pericles were the people's daily 
newspaper, and their speeches the leading articles. The 
orator was at once the " Times," the " Saturday Review," 
the "Edinburgh Review," and a great deal more; he com- 
bined in himself the journalist, the debater, the critic, and 
the preacher, all in one. 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 41 

In the assembly, the forum, the portico, and the garden, 
the ancients stood face to face with their great men, and 
drank in their living thoughts as they fell warm from their 
lips. " Look," says Tacitus, in the Dialogue already quoted, 
" look through the circle of the fine arts, survey the whole 
compass of the sciences, and tell me in what branch can 
the professors acquire a name to vie with the celebrity of 
a great and powerful orator. His fame does not depend 
on the opinion of thinking men, who attend business and 
watch the administration of affairs; he is applauded by 
the youth of Rome, — by all who hope to rise by honorable 
means. The eminent orator is the model which every 
parent recommends to his children. Even the common 
people stand and gaze as he passes by; they pronounce 
his name with pleasure, and point to him as the object of 
their admiration. The provinces resound with his praise. 
The strangers who arrive from all parts have heard of 
his genius; they wish to behold the man; and their curi- 
osity is never at rest till they have seen his person and 
perused his countenance. Foreign nations court his friend- 
ship. The magistrates setting out for their provinces make 
it their business to ingratiate themselves with the popular 
speaker, and at their return take care to renew their 
homage. The powerful orator has no occasion to solicit 
preferment, — the offices of praetor and consul stand open 
to him, — to those exalted stations he is invited. Even in 
the rank of private citizen his share of power is consider- 
able, since his authority sways at once the senate and the 
people." 

Such were the power and influence . of the orator in 
Greece and Rome till the one was conquered and the other 
imperialized, when the art declined in both. All this has 
2* 



42 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

been changed in modern times, and the effect has been to 
destroy, to a considerable extent, the distinction between 
oratory and other productions, and in some degree to 
diminish the demand for oratory proper. The political 
orator now speaks less to those who are assembled within 
the walls of Parliament or Congress than to the public 
outside. His aim, oftentimes, is not so much to convince 
and move those into whose faces he looks, as those who 
will peruse his words on the printed page. He knows 
that if a thousand persons hear him, ten thousand will 
read him. Not only the legislator, but the stump orator, 
and even the advocate on great occasions, address them- 
selves to the reporters. That the new audience is of a 
different complexion and temper from the old, — that it 
weighs the speaker's words more carefully and dispassion- 
ately, and is influenced more by his facts and logic, and 
less by his appeals to the passions, — is obvious. The 
pugnce quam pompce aptius is the order of the day: and 
men fight now with the clenched fist, rather than with the 
open hand, — with logic more than with rhetoric. The 
magnetism of personal appearance, the charm of manner, 
the music of the modulated tone, have lost their old 
supremacy; while the command of facts, the capacity for 
"cubic thought," the ability to reason, the power of con- 
densed and vivid expression, have acquired a new value. 
It is not he who can rouse, thrill, or melt his hearers by 
his electric appeals, that now exercises the greatest and 
most lasting influence, but he who can make the most 
forcible and unanswerable statement, — who can furnish 
the logic of facts, the watchwords of party, the shibboleths 
of debate, — who can crush an adversary in a sentence, or 
condense a policy into a thundering epigram. A thousand 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 43 

presses reproduce his words, and they ring in the brain 
when the fiery declamation of the merely impassione 
orator is forgotten. 

The practice of addressing the reporter, a practice un- 
known in the days of Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, and Chat- 
ham, has, in another way, still farther revolutionized the 
style of public speech-making. As the best reporters fall 
short of perfect accuracy, many speakers prefer to be 
their own reporters, in other words, prepare their speeches 
in manuscript; and now the custom of writing out 
speeches and committing them to memory, is leading to 
that of reading them. A large proportion of the so- 
called " speeches " that are franked by Congressmen to 
their constituents, are "delivered 1 ' in this way. Any- 
thing more fatal to a speaker's influence, — better fitted 
to stifle every germ of eloquence, — cannot be imagined. 
As Sydney Smith asks: "What can be more ludicrous 
than an orator delivering stale indignation and fervor 
of a week old; turning over whole pages of violent pas- 
sions, written out in German text; reading the tropes 
and apostrophes into which he is hurried by the ardor of 
his mind; and so affected at a preconcerted line and 
page, that he is unable to proceed any further?" Of 
course there is a gain, in such cases, of precision and 
accuracy; but the form of the effort has changed. It is 
not a speech or oration, but a dissertation or essay. The 
reception given by the House to such performances is 
just that which might be expected. As they are not de- 
signed for the ear of that body, but for the speaker's 
constituency, the House abandons to the constituency the 
exclusive enjoyment of them.' Indeed, some " speeches " 
are not so much as read in Congress, but printed "by 



44 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

permission"; and during the Impeachment of President 
Johnson, and the discussion of the Silver Bill, a new 
precedent was established in the United States Senate, — 
that of "filing" arguments, — a "labor limce" of which 
Aristarchus and Horace never dreamed. So strong are 
the tendencies in this direction, that a writer has gone 
so far as to predict that the day is not far distant when 
even lawyers will submit printed arguments to judges 
and juries, to be read and weighed in the chamber and 
jury-room, and that the practice of making long ha- 
rangues will be abandoned as tedious and wasteful of 
time, and tending to mystify and confuse rather than to 
enlighten and convince. 

There is still another way in which oratory, especially 
legislative oratory, has been influenced by the press. A 
century ago, when the newspaper was in its infancy, and 
had not yet aspired to be an organ of public opinion, 
the great leaders in debate had access to sources of in- 
telligence which were out of the reach of the public, and 
even to most members of the legislature. To illumine a^ 
subject by novel and original arguments, to startle his 
hearers by new and unexpected information, was then 
easy for a speaker; and if there was a political crisis, or 
the question was a vital one, he was listened to with 
breathless interest. It is said that not a little of the 
younger Pitt's success was due to his power of weight- 
ing his speeches with facts known only to himself, and 
letting out secrets, where needful, which told like shells 
as they drop into an advancing column. It was to the 
facts brought to light, and the considerations urged in 
debate, that many representatives looked for the mate- 
rials by which to form their judgments and to guide 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 45 

their votes. All this the press, with its unrivalled means 
of collecting and conveying information, has changed. 
The Gladstone or Disraeli, the Clay or Calhoun of the 
day, has no facts or statistics concerning the question of 
the hour, which are not open to the humblest citizen. 
Weeks before the final struggle comes, the daily journals 
have sucked up, from all the sources of information, all 
the facts, arguments, and illustrations pertinent to the 
subject, like so many electrical machines gathering elec- 
tricity from the atmosphere into themselves. All the 
precedents and parallel cases which have the remotest 
bearing upon the issue, have been preempted by the ed- 
itors and their contributors ; and when the unfortunate 
senator gets on his legs, he finds his arguments antici- 
pated, his metaphors stale, his " thunder " stolen, and his 
subject in the condition of a squeezed orange. 

There is yet another circumstance which has lessened 
the influence of the orator, at least of the political or- 
ator, in modern times, especially within the last century. , 
It is the spirit of party, which steels men's minds against^ 
conviction, and renders his impassioned appeals unavail- 
ing. In the days when there were no newspapers and 
no reporters, the representative in a political assembly 
was comparatively independent of his constituents. His 
vote upon a measure was determined more or less by the 
arguments which were marshalled for or against it by 
the leaders in debate. The orator might then hope to 
produce that effect which Cicero considered so honorable, 
— " mentes impellere quo velit, unde autem velit dedu- 
cere." Now, the chains of party are so strong, he is so 
cowed by fear of his political chiefs, so hampered by his 
fear of the electors, that he has almost ceased to be a 



46 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

free agent. In vain does the orator bring forward the 
weightiest, the most unanswerable reasons for a bill; in 
vain does he urge its adoption by the most passionate 
appeals; the Opposition laughs, weeps, applauds, but does 
not change its votes. The men whom he addresses, at 
least many of them, have held their political sentiments 
till they have become rooted in the very fibres of their 
being. From their very childhood, they have been fed 
with the milk of radicalism, or nourished on the strong 
meat of conservatism, till a change of opinion would in- 
volve a change in their mental constitution. If, instead 
of being thus steeled against conviction, they could be 
persuaded in a single instance by a hostile orator, they 
would sacrifice that single instance to the general prin- 
ciples on which their preference is founded. Ferguson 
of Pitfour, a Scotch member of Parliament, and a sup- 
porter of the younger Pitt, was a type of too many rep- 
resentatives. He used to say: "I have heard many ar- 
guments which convinced my judgment, but never one 
that influenced nry vote." The party speaker is robbed 
c c half of his eloquence, because he speaks under an evi- 
dent restraint. His tone is not that of a bold, independ- 
ent thinker, without which there can be no eloquence of 
the highest order, but that of an agent. He is shackled 
by a consciousness of his responsibility; he is thinking of 
the pledges of the last election, and of the prospects of 
the next. 

That there has been a great change, within a hundred 
years, in the oratory of the British Parliament, is known 
to all. In the days of Chatham, and of Fox, Pitt, and 
Burke, the mere gift of eloquence alone was a passport, 
— as it was almost the only passport, — to the highest 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 47 

offices in the state. A man could not then so readily ride 
into office on the shoulders of a mob. But if he could sway 
the House of Commons, the lack of other abilities was' 
excused. George the Third used to say that Pitt knew 
nothing of Vattel, and we have the minister's own state- 
ment that the only history of England he had read was 
Shakspeare. Fox led the Opposition in utter ignorance 
of political economy, and Sheridan failed of the Chancel- 
lorship of the Exchequer only because he could not master 
the mystery of fractions. The speeches made in Parlia- 
ment were then the topics of common conversation; they 
influenced the votes of the House; they startled their 
hearers into admiration; they calmed or roused the pas- 
sions of the country. No parallel can be cited in later 
times to the effect produced in the House of Commons 
by Sheridan's famous harangue upon the " Fourth Charge" 
against Warren Hastings, or to the spell in which the 
House was bound by the elder Pitt. 

Sir James Mackintosh once observed that the true light 
in which to consider speaking in the House of Commons 
was as an animated conversation on public business, an':, 
that it was rare for any speech to succeed which was raised 
on any other basis. Canning held a similar opinion. He 
said that the House was a business assembly, and that the 
debates must conform to its predominant character; that 
it was particularly jealous of ornament and declamation, 
and that, if they were employed at all, they must seem 
to spring naturally out of the subject. There must be 
method also, but this should be felt in the effect rather 
than seen in the manner, — no formal divisions, set ex- 
ordiums, or perorations, as the old rhetoricians taught, 
would do. First and last and everywhere you must aim 



48 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

\ at reasoning, and, if you would be eloquent, you might at 
• any time, but not at an appointed time. Macaulay, in a 
letter to Prof. Whewell, calls the House " the most peculiar 
audience in the world. A place where Walpole succeeded, 
and Addison failed; where Dundas succeeded, and Burke 
failed; where Peel now succeeds, and where Mackintosh 
fails; where Erskine and Scarlett were dinner-bells; where 
Lawrence and Jekyll, the two wittiest men, or nearly 
so, of their time, were thought bores, — is surely a very 
strange place." 

If in the days of Mackintosh and Canning the House 
hated rhetoric, and was bent on transacting business; 
rather than on listening to grand exordiums and studied 
perorations, to-day it is even more practical, and more 
fiercely intolerant of fine speeches and abstractions. Gov- 
ernment now takes its rank among the sciences, and mere 
intellectual cleverness, unallied with experience, informa- 
tion, and character, has little weight or influence. The 
leaders of Conservatism and Liberalism are no longer men 
who have the art of manufacturing polished and epigram- 
- matic phrases, but those who are skilled in the arts of 
Parliamentary fence and management, and who have made 
state-craft the study of their lives. These men, though 
they hem, and haw and stammer, and can hardly put their 
sentences together in logical order, take their seats on the 
Treasury bench as Secretaries of State, while the mere 
orators, who have no special experience or information, sit 
on the back benches or below the gangway. Indeed, ac- 
cording to the testimony of an able British reviewer, it has 
even been the custom of late to decry oratorical powers, as 
tending to dazzle and mislead, rather than to instruct and 
to edify; and to praise the dull, dry harangue of the plod- 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 49 

ding man of business, who crams down the throat of his 
audience a heap of statistical facts, and then wonders to 
find his hearers yawning or asleep, rather than the brilliant 
speech of the trained orator, who enlivens his theme with 
the sallies of wit, and adorns it with the graces of imagery. 
So great a change has taken place, even within the last 
half century, that the House is now little more than a 
place where five or six hundred gentlemen meet to do busi- 
ness, very much after the fashion of a board of bank di- 
rectors. Disraeli, Bright, and Palmer, indulge in no such 
bursts of oratory as shook the senate in the latter half of 
the eighteenth century. They state their views plainly, 
tersely, with little preambling and little embellishment; 
and having delivered themselves of what they had to say, 
they conclude as abruptly as they began. Occasionally 
speeches of a more ambitious kind are heard in the House: 
but they are so few that their contrast to the ordinary 
tone of the debates is only the more glaring. 

From all these considerations it is evident that oratory 
no longer occupies the place which it once did, before the 
discovery of " the art preservative of arts." and the gen- 
eral diffusion of knowledge. It is no longer the only 
effective weapon of the statesman and the reformer. There 
are no potentates now that, like Philip of Macedon, would 
offer a town of ten thousand inhabitants for an orator. 
But shall we therefore hastily conclude that eloquence is 
a useless art, — that time and labor spent in its study is 
wasted? Is it, indeed, true that the orator's occupation 
has gone, — that the newspaper has killed him, — that his 
speech is forestalled by the daily editorial, which, flying on 
the wings of steam, addresses fifty thousand men, while he 
speaks to five hundred? By no means. Eloquence is not, 



50 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

and never will be, a useless art. In one form or another. 
it is immortal, and, so long as there are human hearts 
beating with hope and fear, love and passionate hatred, can 
never perish. It may no longer enjoy a monopoly of influ- 
ence, as before the days of Gutenberg and Furst; the form 
and tone of society may change, demanding different styles 
of oratory in different ages; but wherever human beings 
exist who have souls to be thrilled, the public speaker will 
find scope for the exertion of his powers. " Wherever.*' as 
Emerson says, ' ; the polarities meet, wherever the fresh 
moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, comes 
in direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of 
gain, the spark will pass."' 

Man, in short, so long as he is a social being, will never 
cease, in public as well as in private, to talk. Extend the 
empire of the press to whatever point you will, — double, 
treble, and quadruple its power. — and yet the day will 
never come when this " fourth estate of the nation " can 
do the entire work of the orator. In every civilized com- 
munity, — at least, in every free country, — it will still be 
necessary to cite precedents and analyze testimony and 
enforce great principles in the courts, to explain measures 
in the halls of legislation, to rouse and move men from 
the platform and the hustings, and, above all, to plead with 
men in the house of God. Not a day passes in which it is 
not in the power of a persuasive tongue to exert some 
influence, for good or evil, over the will, judgments, and 
actions of men ; and so far is it from being true that 
oratorical gifts in this age are comparatively useless, that 
there is probably no other accomplishment which, when 
possessed even in a moderate degree, raises its possessor to 
consideration with equal rapidity, none for which there is 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 51 

a more constant demand in the senate, at the bar, on the 
hustings, and in almost every sphere of professional labor. 
Even should we admit all that has been claimed regarding 
the impoverished condition to which civil eloquence has 
been reduced in modern times by the complexity of busi- 
ness, it must . still be remembered that, as De Quincey has 
observed, oratory has received a new dowry of power, and 
that of the highest order, in the sanctities of our religion, 
a field unknown to antiquity, since the Pagan religions 
produced no oratory whatever. 

Again, it should be remembered that the political plat- 
form offers a field of oratory not inferior to any it has / 
enjoyed during the world's histoiy. Chained or muzzled 
in the courts, and scorned in the legislature, it may here 
spurn the earth with its broadest pinions, and wing its 
flight, without let or hindrance, to the " highest heaven 
of invention/' The Platform, the occasional stage of the 
Fourth-of-July panegyrist and the Commencement orator, 
is the great theatre of the agitator, — the stage on which 
reformers and enthusiasts of every kind, civil, political, 
moral, and financial, come to present their respective 
theories to the people, and to organize those movements, 
that " pressure from without," those manufactures of 
public opinion, which are now relied upon as the great 
means of revolutionizing legislatures and changing the 
laws. At the "monster meetings" which are there ad- 
dressed, the orator is restricted by no " Robert's Manual " 
or five-minute rule, but can expatiate at will, convincing 
his hearers by facts and logic, convulsing them with wit 
and humor, or rousing them by his fiery appeals, like 
another Antony " moving the very stones of Rome to rise 
and mutiny." Besides this, the lecture-room affords still 



52 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

another field for almost every species of eloquence, — a 
field which is more and more occupied at each succeeding 
year, and which was altogether unknown to the orators 
of antiquity. 

It is true there are no schools of rhetoric now, in which 
the entire education of a young man is directed to make 
him an orator. It is true, also, that the style of speaking 
which was irresistible in an ancient assembly, — an assem- 
bly made up of men " educated exactly to that point at 
which men are most susceptible of strong and sudden im- 
pressions, acute, but not sound reasoners, warm in their 
feelings, unfixed in their principles, and passionate admirers 
of fine composition," — is not the most influential now. The 
exclamations and tropes which produced the mightiest effects 
upon the sensitive populace of Athens or Rome, would now, 
with whatever modulation or o-esture they might be de- 
claimed, make but little impression upon a legislative 
assembly. The oratorical device by which Scipio Africanus 
shook off a charge of peculation, would hardly avail a 
modern Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary of the 
Treasury. If President Grant had been impeached before 
the United States Senate, it would hardly have helped 
his case to say, 4i This day last year I won the battle of 
Chattanooga: therefore why debate?" The day has gone 
by, too, when the mere objective features of oratory, the 
statuary and the millinery, were as potent almost as the 
sentiments uttered; and why? Nobody can doubt that, as 
another has said, if the ancient oratory were in demand 
now, it would wake from the sleep of two thousand years 
without the aid of the rhetorician. But the truth is, it 
is to the very superiority of our civilization to that of the 
ancients, that the revolution in oratory, and the apparent 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 53 

diminution of its influence, are owing. Instead of lament- 
ing, we should rejoice that we no longer live on that vol- 
canic soil which in former ages produced fiery orators in 
such abundance. It is because society is no longer under 
the sway of a few leading men, — because revolutions, 
tumults, and popular commotions, have ceased to be the 
chief business of life, — because knowledge has been gen- 
erally diffused, men have learned to think for themselves, 
and the free nations of the earth are disposed to rest the 
security of the state and of individuals on the broad 
foundations of laws and institutions, and not on popular 
caprice or the power of any one man, however wise or 
able, — that modern eloquence has assumed a character so 
different from the ancient, and is regarded by many as 
comparatively cold and tame. 

It is one of the proudest distinctions of modern society 
that the ancient power of individuals is lessened; that it is 
no longer possible for a great man, by violence or artful 
contrivance, to overthrow a state; that he is continually 
taught that the world can do without him, and that, if he 
would do the greatest good, he must combine with other 
men, rather than be their master or dictator. It is not by 
absorbing all power into himself, and becoming at once the 
brain, the tongue, and the hand of a whole people, that 
the man of genius to-day is to promote the happiness or 
the glory of the state to which he belongs, but by an open 
influence on public opinion and a wise cooperation with 
others, who are jealous of their rights, and will not place 
them at the mercy of one man, however wise or great. 
The orator, therefore, however rare or dazzling his gifts, 
can no longer be the despot that he once was, either for 
good or for evil. It is no longer by his agency chiefly that 



54 ORATORY AKD ORATORS. 

public opinion is formed or expressed, but by private dis- 
cussion, by the interchange of sentiments at the fireside, 
on the street, at the exchange, and, above all, by the agency 
of the press and the telegraph. Even the character of 
public discussions has changed. A modern debate, it has 
been truly said, is not a struggle between a few leading 
men for triumph over each other and an ignorant multi- 
tude; the orator himself is but one of the multitude, 
deliberating with them upon the common interests; and, 
instead of coming to a raw, unenlightened audience, who 
have never weighed the subjects upon which he is to ad- 
dress them, and who are ready to be the victims of any 
cunning and plausible speaker who can blind them by his 
sophistry, dazzle them by his rhetoric, or captivate them by 
his honeyed accents, he finds that he is speaking to men 
who have read, thought, and pondered upon his theme, 
who have already decided opinions, and care less to hear 
his eloquence than to know what his eloquence can do for 
the question. J 

From all this it is evident that the demand for oratory 
is not less than in former ages, but that a different style of 
oratory is demanded. Because imagination and passion do 
not predominate in modern eloquence, but hold a subor- 
dinate place: because the orator speaks to the head as well 
as to the heart of his hearers, and employs facts and logic 
more than the flowers of fancy: because his most fiery 
and burning appeals are pervaded with reason and argu- 
ment as well as with passion, it by no means follows that 
his power is curtailed. As well might we conclude that the 
earthquake and the tempest are the mightiest agencies in 
nature because their results are instantaneous and visible, 
and that the gentle rain, the dew, and the sunshine are 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 55 

feeble in comparison, because they work slowly, quietly, 
and unseen. Is it a task less noble to convince than to 
inflame mankind? Does a sudden burst of feeling require 
a greater power or intenshVy of mind than a long chain of 
reasoning? Has not argument as well as explosion its 
eloquence, and may it not be adorned with as splendid 
illustrations ? 

The truth is, the modern orator has no less, perhaps 
even more influence, than the ancient, but he acts more 
slowly and by degrees. He wins his triumphs of convic- 
tion, not in the very hour he speaks, but in the course of 
weeks, and months, and years. It is not by isolated suc- 
cesses, but in the aggregate, by reiteration, by accumula- 
tion, that he prevails. As an English writer has beautifully 
said, the enchanted spear is not without its place among 
the weapons of our oratorical armory; but, like that of 
Ariosto, it only fells the enemy to the ground, and leaves 
him to start up again un wounded. Fine sentiments, well 
turned and polished periods, have still more or less of their 
old charm with our deliberative assemblies; their effects 
may be seen in the pleased looks, the profound silence, or 
the applause of the listeners; but they are not seen in the 
final enumeration of the ayes and noes. The great major- 
ity of the members contrive to break the enchanter's spell 
before they vote. But though the influence of individual 
speeches may be comparatively slight, the influence of the 
entire eloquence of a leading speaker may be very great. 
The effects of his oratory may be none the less real, because 
they are gradual and hardly perceived; none the less 
powerful, because it is a slow fire, and not a thunderbolt. 
It has been justly said that there is for every man a state- 
ment possible of that truth which he is most unwilling to 



56 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

receive, — a statement possible, so broad and so pungent 
that he cannot get away from it, but must either bend to it 
or die of it. By dint of perseverance and reiteration the 
orator may produce an impression which no single blow, 
however vigorously struck, would make. Every impression, 
however faint, leaves the hearer more apt for impression in 
future by the same hand. A lodgment is made in his heart, 
and if it be steadily followed up, though he cannot be 
stormed, he may be sapped, and at last find it convenient to 
capitulate. 

Again, in spite of the party whip, in spite of the utmost 
perfection of party drill, there are occasional great crises 
in public affairs, — extraordinary periods, — when men will 
burst away from the ranks, and vote according to their 
convictions. As well might the sands of the desert expect 
to be unstirred by the winds, and to remain in a solid 
mass, as parties expect that they will remain unchanged by 
the tornado of eloquence, — the whirlwind and storm of 
oratory, — that at such times sweeps over them. \j 

More than all. character is an important factor in 
modern eloquence. It is his virtues, his stability, his 
known zeal for the right and the true, that quite as 
much as the magnetism of his looks, his siren voice, 
his graces of address, and electric periods, must win for 
the orator attention and confidence now. It is the man 
behind the words that must give them momentum and 
projectile force. The impression which every speaker 
makes on his fellows, is the moral resultant, not only of 
what he says, but of all that he has grown up to be; of 
his manhood, weak or strong, sterling or counterfeit: of 
a funded but unreckoned influence, accumulating uncon- 
sciously, and spending itself, as the man is deep or shal- 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 57 

low, like a reservoir, or like a spout or an April shower. 
Especially in times of civil commotion, in great crises, when 
public interests are imperilled, when war or anarchy 
threatens the land, is this element of oratory most potent. 
It is no festival eloquence, no vain mockery of art, that 
will then meet the exigency, but the sincere, heart-felt 
appeals of a speaker whose whole life has exemplified the 
sentiments he enforces, and who is known to be willing 
to give his life, if need be, in defense of his principles. 
Thus supported, the faculty of speech is power, — power 
such as no other faculty can give, and we may say of it 
in the words of an eloquent writer: "It is political pow- 
er; it is statesmanship. No recommendation can supply 
the absence of its prestige. Splendid abilities, the utmost 
literary renown, are without it insufficient testimonies. 
Dissociated from it, the "historian of the Roman Empire 
lingers below the gangway. Assisted by it, a cornet of 
horse becomes the arbiter of Europe/' 

Finally, it should not be forgotten that while the an- 
cient orator enjoyed certain advantages which are denied 
to his successor at the present day, these are compensated 
in a great measure by the prodigious extension of knowl- 
edge, and the consequently greatly increased number and 
variety of ideas and illustrations which are at the com- 
mand of the modern orator. As far as the world, — we 
had almost said, the universe, — made known by science 
to the moderns exceeds that known to the ancients, so 
far do the facts and ideas which the speaker of the nine- 
teenth century may employ, surpass in multitude, vari- 
ety, and grandeur, those which were at the disposal of 
the most brilliant or potent genius of antiquity. Not 
only have the vast additions made to human knowledge 



58 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

by the discoveries of the physical geographer, the geol- 
ogist, the chemist, the botanist, the natural philosopher, 
and the astronomer, furnished a store of new ideas, allu- 
sions, and images, with which to captivate, startle, or en- 
lighten an assembly, but history has replenished her 
storehouses with myriads of new political precedents and 
examples of heroism and virtue; modern poetry has 
added its gems of thought and expression, — its charmed 
words, — to those which antiquity has bequeathed to us: 
and, more than all, the christian religion has opened a 
new fountain of inspiration, and furnished the orator 
with a store of thoughts, images, and associations, which, 
whether fitted to please and inspire, or to awe and ap- 
pal, are more powerful than any others in moving the 
human heart. 

To conclude. — in comparing the influence of ancient 
and modern oratory, we have spoken of some of the 
changes which have taken place within two centuries in 
modern British eloquence. There is still another change 
which it may not be improper to consider for a few mo- 
ments in this place. Why is it that parliamentary 
speeches, both in this country and England, are now 
adorned, (or disfigured, as the reader pleases,) with so few 
quotations from the classics '? Is it because the age . is 
less pedantic than formerly? or because the legislators of 
this century have less knowledge of the Greek and Ro- 
man authors, and less taste for them, than the legislators 
of the eighteenth century? Certain it is that the apt 
and telling quotations for which Horace and Virgil used 
to be racked, are heard no more in our political assem- 
blies. A great speech unadorned by a few Latin verses 
was a rarity m the days of Pitt; and the English poets, 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 59 

too, of which Mr. Bright has now a monopoly, were never 
long neglected. Burke quoted Horace, Lucan, and Juve- 
nal; gems from Virgil sparkle in almost all of his 
speeches; and to brilliants borrowed from Milton some 
of his finest passages owe half of their effect. Fox, 
though a fine classic, quoted rarely, and then from Vir- 
gil;* but some of Pitt's most happy effects were produced 
by apt quotation. His mind was so thoroughly steeped 
in classical literature, that it colors his speeches " like 
the shifting, varying, yet constantly prevalent hue in shot 
silk." His allusion to the departure of fortune, Laudo 
manentem, etc.; his reply to Conway on the East India 
bill, in which he appropriated Scipio's answer. " Si nulla 
alia re, modestia certe et temperando linguam adolescens 
senem vicero"; his application of the beams of the rising- 
sun that shot through the windows of the House, while 
he was prophesying a better day for Africa, — 

" Nos ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis 
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina vesper"; — 

his application to Fox of the lines. 

" Stetimus tela aspera contra 
Contulimusque maims: experto crede quantus 
In clipeum assurgat, quo turbine torqueat hastam " 

were some of the things that made his fame. In later 
times Canning, who was a fine classical scholar, sprinkled 

*Lord Lytton, in his admirable essays on i- Life, Literature, and Manners," 
observes that " in the Fox of St. Stephen's, the nervous reasoner from premises 
the broadest and most popular, there is no trace of the Fox of St. Anne's, the 
refining verbal critic, with an almost feminine delight in the filigree and trinkets 
of literature. At rural leisure, under his apple-blossoms, his predilection in 
scholarship is for its daintiest subtleties ; his happiest remarks are on writers 
very little read. But place the great critic on the floor of the House of Com- 
mons, and not a vestige of the fine verbal critic is visible. His classical allu- 
sions are then taken from passages the most popularly known. And, indeed, it 
was a saying of Fox's, that v no young member should hazard in Parliament a 
Latin quotation not found in the Eton Grammar.'' "—Caxtoniana. Vol. J, p. 253. 



60 ORATORY AKD ORATORS. 

his speeches with felicitous quotations from the Latin 
poets. In one of his most luminous and eloquent speeches, 
delivered in 1826 in defense of his Portuguese policy, he 
likens England to the ruler of the winds, as described 
by Virgil: 

" Celsa sedet ^Eolus arce 
Sceptra tenens: mollitque animos, temperat iras: 
Xi faciat, maria ac terras caelumque profundum 
Quippe ferant rapidi secum, verrantque per auras. 1 ' 

In the courts of justice also, both of England and our 
own country, striking effects used to be produced by 
well-chosen bits from Virgil, Martial, and Horace. What 
could be happier than the reply of Law (afterward Lord 
Ellenborough), to an angry explosion of Erskine, to whom 
Chief Justice Kenyon, before whom they were pleading, 
was unduly partial? Fixing his eye first on Erskine. and 
then on Kenyon. Law replied in the words of the pros- 
trate Turnus to iEneas: 

" Xon me tua fervida terrent 
Dicta, ferox! Dii me terrent. et Jupiter hostis." 

Not less felicitous was the skill with which William 
Wirt, in the celebrated "steamboat case" which came 
before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1824, 
retorted on his eminent antagonist, Mr. Emmet, a quota- 
tion of the latter from Virgil. The cause was one of deep 
interest and importance, not only on account of the indi- 
vidual rights involved, but on account of the collisions of 
those of the State of New York with those of Connecticut 
and New Jersey, which gave rise to it. The chief question 
was whether the laws of the first-named State, which con- 
ferred upon Messrs. Fulton and Livingston the exclusive 
rio-ht to navigate its waters with steamboats, were or 
were not in violation of the Constitution of the United 



IS ORATORY A LOST ART? 61 

States. Mr. Emmet, who was counsel for New York, had 
eloquently personified her as casting her eyes over the 
ocean, witnessing everywhere the triumphs of her genius, 
and exclaiming, in the language of iEneas: 

1 Quae regio in terris, nostri non plenae laboris? 1 ' 

Mr. Wirt saw at once the error his opponent had com- 
mitted, and giving the true sense of the word " laboris," 
turned the tables upon him as follows: 

" Sir, it was not in the moment of triumph, nor with the feelings of tri- 
umph, that ^Eneas uttered that exclamation. It was when, with his faithful 
Achates by his side, he was surveying the works of art with which the palace 
of Carthage was adorned, and his attention had been caught by a representa- 
tion of the battles of Troy. There he saw the sons of Atreus and Priam, and 
the fierce Achilles. The whole extent of his fortunes; the loss and desola- 
tion of his friends; the fall of his beloved country; rushed upon his recol- 
lection : 

' Constitit et lachrymans, quis jam locus, inquit, Achate, 
Quae regio in terris, nostri non plenae laboris?' 

"Sir. the passage may hereafter have a closer application to the cause 
than my eloquent and classical friend intended. For if the state of things 
which has already commenced, is to go on; if the spirit of hostility which 
already exists in three of our states, is to catch by contagion, and spread 
among the rest, as, from the progress of the human passions, and the unavoid- 
able conflict of interests, it will too surely do; what are we to expect? Civil 
wars, arising from far inferior causes, have desolated some of the fairest 
provinces of the earth. . . . It is the high province of this court to inter- 
pose its benign and mediatorial influence. ... If. sir. you do not interpose 
your friendly hand, and extirpate the seeds of anarchy which New York has 
sown, you will have civil war. The war of legislation, which has already 
commenced, will, according to its usual course, become a war of blows. 
Your country will be shaken with civil strife. Your republican institutions 
will perish in the conflict, Your constitution will fall. The last hope of na- 
tions will be gone. And what will be the effect upon the rest of the world? 
Look abroad at the scenes now passing upon our globe, and judge of that 
effect. The friends of free government throughout the earth, who have been 
heretofore animated by our example, and have cheerfully cast their glance 
to it, as to their polar star, to guide them through the stormy seas of revolu- 
tion, will witness our fall with dismay and despair. The arm that is every 
where lifted in the cause of liberty, will drop unnerved by the warrior's 
side. Despotism will have its day of triumph, and will accomplish the pur 
pose at which it too certainly aims. It will cover the earth with the mantle 
of mourning. Then, sir, when New York shall look upon this scene of ruin, 
if she have the generous feelings which I believe her to have, it will not be 
with her head aloft, in the pride of conscious triumph, her ' rapt soul sitting 
in her eyes.' No, sir, no! Dejected with shame and confusion, drooping 



62 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

under the weight of her sorrow, with a voice suffocated with despair, xoell 
may she then exclaim, 

• Qui* jam locus. 

Quae regio in terris, nostri non plenae laboris?'*"* 

At the present day, with the exception of Gladstone, 
who introduces a new bit of Virgil into every fresh speech, 
no English or American orator adorns his speeches with 
jewels from the ancient classics. The late Lord Palmer- 
ston startled the public a few years ago with a morceau 
from Seneca; but the practice has nearly passed away. 
The explanation of the change is, that the age is intensely 
practical. In the early stages of civilization oratory and 
literature are apt to be confounded: but. as society ad- 
vances, the distinction between them becomes more and 
more broadly marked. Oratory ceases to talk; writing 
ceases to be speech-like. The world, in these prosaic, utili- 
tarian times, is becoming every day more impatient of 
pedantry, of rhetorical display, of everything that favors or 
savors of long-windedness: and parliamentary and forensic 
orators, knowing this fact, try to speak tersely and to the 
point, avoiding everything that is merely ornamental. It 
is said by a traveler that the wild Indian hunter will some- 
times address a bear in a strain of eloquence, and make a 
visible impression on him; but whatever may be the taste 
of Indians and bears, it is certain that civilized men, in pro- 
portion as they increase in culture, will avoid whatever is 
high-flown in oratory, study brevity and plainness, and 
keep to the subject before them. 

* Mr. Wirt was a constant student of the Latin classics, and often quoted 
them, with great felicity, in the court-room. "In the company of men of 
letters. " he used to say. "'there is no higher accomplishment than that of 
readily making an apt quotation from the classics; and before such a body 
as the Supreme Court these quotations are not only appropriate, but consti- 
tute a beautiful aid to argument. They mark the scholar.— which is always 
agreeable to a bench that is composed of scholars," 



CHAPTER III. 

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOK. 

OF all the efforts of the human mind, there is no one 
which demands for its success so rare a union of 
mental gifts as eloquence. For its ordinary displays the 
prerequisites are clear perception, memory, power of state- 
ment, logic, imagination, force of will, and passion; but, 
for its loftiest flights, it demands a combination of the most 
exalted powers, — a union of the rarest faculties. Unite in 
one man the most varied and dissimilar gifts, — a strong 
and masculine understanding with a brilliant imagination; 
a nimble wit with a solid judgment; a prompt and te- 
nacious memory with a lively and fertile fancy; an eye for 
the beauties of nature with a knowledge of the realities 
of life; a brain stored with the hived wisdom of the ages, 
and a heart swelling with emotion, — and you have the 
moral elements of a great orator. But even these qualifi- 
cations, so seldom harmonized in one man, are not all. 
Eloquence is a physical as well as an intellectual product: 
it has to do with the body as well as with the mind. It is 
not a cold and voiceless enunciation of abstract truth; it is 
truth warm and palpitating. — reason ' ; permeated and made 
red-hot with passion." It demands, therefore, a trained, 
penetrating, and sympathetic voice, ranging through all 
the keys in the scale, by which all the motions and agita- 
tions, all the shudderings and throbbings of the heart, no 
less than the subtlest acts, the nimblest operations of the 

63 



64 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

mind, — in fine, all the modifications of the moral life, — 
may find a tone, an accent. The eye as well as the lip*, 
the heaving chest and the swaying arm, the whole frame 
quivering with emotion, have a part: and the speech that 
thrills, melts, or persuades, is the result of them all com- 
bined. The orator needs, therefore, a stout bodily frame, 
especially as his calling is one that rapidly wears the 
nerves, and exhausts the vital energy. 

A man may have the bow of Ulysses, but of what use 
is it, if he has not strength to bend it to his will? His 
arrows may be of silver, and gold-tipped; they may be 
winged with the feathers of the very bird of Paradise; 
but if he cannot draw them to the head, and send them 
home to the mark, of what value are they to him? The 
most potent speakers, in all ages, have been distinguished 
for bodily stamina. They have been, with a few remark- 
able exceptions, men of brawny frame, with powerful 
digestive organs, and lungs of great aerating capacity. 
They have been men " who. while they had a sufficient 
thought- power to create all the material needed, had pre- 
eminently the explosive power by which they could thrust 
their materials out at men. They were catapults, and 
men went down before them." Burke and Fox were 
men of stalwart frame. Mirabeau had the neck of a 
bull, and a prodigious chest out of which issued that 
voice of thunder before which the French chamber 
quailed in awe. Brougham had a constitution of lig- 
num-vitse, which stood the wear and tear of ceaseless 
activity for more than eighty years. Daniel Webster's 
physique was so extraordinary that it drew all eyes upon 
him ; and Sydney Smith could describe him only as " a 
steam-engine in breeches. 1 ' Chalmers had a large frame, 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 65 

with a ponderous brain, and a general massiveness of 
countenance which suggested great reserved strength, 
and reminded those who watched it in repose of one of 
Landseer's or Thorwaldsen's lions. Even those orators 
who have not had giant frames, have had, at least, 
closely-knit ones, — the bodily activity and quickness of 
the athlete. It was said of Lord Erskine that his action 
sometimes reminded one of a blood-horse. When urging 
a plea with passionate fervor, his eye flashed, the nostril 
distended, he threw back his head, "his neck was clothed 
with thunder." There was in him the magnificent ani- 
mal, as well as the proud and fiery intellect, and the 
whole frame quivered with pent-up excitement. Curran 
could rise before a jury, after a session of sixteen hours, 
with a brief intermission, and make one of the most 
memorable arguments of his life. The massive frames 
of O'Connell and John Bright. England's greatest living 
orator, are familiar to all. 

Besides all these qualifications, there are others hardly 
less essential to the ideal orator. He must have the/ 
continuity of thought which is requisite for a prolonged 
argument, and the ready wit which can seize and turn 
to use any incident which may occur in the course of its 
delivery. Last, but not least, is demanded that com-^.7 
manding will, which, as it is one of the most valuable 
mental gifts, is also one of the rarest, and is still more 
rarely found in union with the brilliant and dazzling 
qualities that are the soul of every art which is to sub- 
due or captivate mankind. 

In view of the extraordinary qualifications required 
for the highest eloquence, it is not strange that it is so 
uncommon. A great orator,— one who has perfectly 
3* 



66 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

grasped the art of bodying forth to eye and ear all 
there is in him, and who utters accordingly great 
thoughts and great feelings, is a most rare and magnifi- 
cent creation of the Almighty. There is a well-known 
saw which declares that "the poet is born, the orator is 
made' 1 ; but nothing can be more absurd than this dis- 
tinction. Both are born, and both are made. As the 
poet, however gifted, requires much and careful self- 
culture to produce the finest' verse, so the orator, how- 
ever Herculean his industry, needs a basis of native 
genius, as well as incessant study and practice, to reach 
the loftiest heights of eloquence. Without the native 
faculty, the inborn genius, he may become a fluent de- 
claimer, but in vain will he covet the grand triumphs 
of the rostrum. The profoundest reflection and the most 
exhaustless knowledge are unavailing here. Nature only 
it is that can inspire that rapturous enthusiasm, that 
burning passion, that "furious pride and joy of the 
soul," which calls up the imagination of the orator, — 
that makes his rhetoric become a whirlwind, and his 
logic, fire. 

The grandest passages, the most thrilling bursts, in 
the annals of eloquence, have been those which have cost 
the least trouble; for they came as if by inspiration. 
Like a chariot-wheel in violent motion, the soul of the 
orator catches fire in the swiftness of its movement, and 
throws off those divine flashes which fascinate mankind. 
Chatham's indignant burst in reply to the Duke of Rich- 
mond was of this character, and who does not do homage to 
its lofty grandeur? Thurlow's scathing reply to the Duke 
of Grafton, when the latter had taunted him with the mean- 
ness of his extraction, — Grattan's overwhelming denuncia- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 67 

tion of Flood, — Curran's blasting denunciations of the gov- 
ernment and its bribed informers, amid the clanking of 
arms that were pointed at his heart, — were all such gushes 
of inspiration. Who that reads Henry's burning speeches 
can doubt that his most thrilling appeals were prompted 
by a similar flush of feeling? And if we go back to the 
great orators of antiquity, how strikingly is this exempli- 
fied in their most memorable triumphs? In every case 
we find that oratory, like the inspiration of the poet, or 
the brilliant conceptions of the painter, flows from a 
source which is beyond the reach of human ken. The 
essential secret is a gift of God, and in vain do we try 
to grasp it and to describe it by seizing its mere forms. 
As Webster has said, "labor and learning may toil for it; 
but they will toil in vain." It was not from rules and 
precepts only that Demosthenes derived that eloquence 
which is represented as lightning, bearing down every 
opposer. No study, — no elaborate preparation, — could 
have produced those electric appeals, — " that disdain, anger, 
boldness, freedom, involved in a continual stream of argu- 
ment, which make his orations the most perfect of oratori- 
cal discourses." To all such orators the secret of their 
grandest successes was doubtless as much a mystery as 
to their hearers. They had arranged nothing, — prepared 
nothing. A leading idea, — a central thought, — was present 
to the mind; but the distribution of the figures, and the 
harmonious adaptation of the colors, were left to that 
wonderful influence which directs genius and consecrates 
it to immortality. 

■ Socrates used to say that " all men are sufficiently elo- 
quent in that which they understand " ; but it would have • 
been more correct to say that no man can be eloquent on a 



68 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

subject which he does not understand; and it is equally 
certain that no man can be eloquent who has not certain 
mental and physical gifts as well as knowledge. Dr. 
Horace Busline] 1 says, in one of his lectures, that forty 
hundred pulpits are wondering that there are no more 
of the eloquent ministers for them. As well mio-ht he 
wonder that in every village there is no Phidias or 
Raphael, and on the wall of every church no Last Sup- 
per, in fresco, by Da Vinci. Excellence, by its very defi- 
nition, is exceptional, and in oratory it is even rarer than 
in sculpture or painting. 

The names of all the men in ancient times, who. by 
the common consent of their contemporaries, had reached 
the highest pinnacle of eloquence, may be counted on the 
fingers of one hand. Greece boasted her three great dra- 
matic poets, besides her epic; but she produced but one 
Demosthenes. The names of iEschines, Lysias, and Hy- 
perides have, indeed, survived the wrecks of time: but 
they were rather finished rhetoricians than masters of the 
oratorical art. The fame of Roman oratory is upheld by 
Cicero alone. Calvus, Caelius, Curio, Crassus, Hortensius, 
Caesar, rose one above another; but the most eloquent of 
these lags so far behind the master, that he is only proxi- 
mus, sed longo intervallo. Cicero himself had so lofty an 
ideal of his art, that he was dissatisfied not only with his 
own performances, but with those of Demosthenes. Ita 
sunt avidae et ca paces meae aures, says he. et semper aJi- 
quid immensum infinitum que desiderant. The number of 
great orators in modern times is almost equally small. 
The pulpit and political eloquence of France, whose Celtic 
genius is peculiarly oratorical, boasts of but two great 
names, Bossuet and Mirabeau, that are comparable with 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 69 

those of her great dramatists; and fertile as Great Britain 
has been in oratorical genius during upward of a century, 
she has never, amid all her epochs of revolution and sen- 
atorial contest, from the days of Bacon to those of Bright, 
produced a single public speaker worthy to rank with 
Milton or Shakspeare. 

No doubt many persons have enjoyed, for a time, great 
fame and influence without some of the qualities which 
we have named as essential to the perfect orator. A bril- s/ 
liant imagination and a sparkling wit may blind us for 
a while to the lack of a solid judgment; and vehement 
action or cogent reasoning ma} r make us for the moment 
forget a squeaking voice, an ugly face, or a diminutive 
figure. John Randolph had a short, small body, perched 
upon high crane legs, so that, when he stood up, you did 
not know when he was to end; yet he commanded the 
attention of the House of Representatives, in spite of his 
gaunt figure and his ear-splitting scream ; and Wilberforce 
was a power in Parliament, though he had but a pigmy 
body and a voice weak and painfully shrill. Boswell, who 
heard him in 1784 at York, wrote to a friend: " I saw 
what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but, 
as I listened, he grew and grew until the shrimp became 
a whale." Richard Lalor Sheil thrilled the Irish people, 
notwithstanding his dwarfish frame, his ungraceful action, 
and a voice so harsh and violent as often to rise to a 
positive shriek. The most magical of American preachers, 
Summerfield, the stories of whose oratorical feats read like 
a page from the "Arabian Nights," was "femininely feeble, 
an invalid all his days." Biography abounds with these 
examples of the mind triumphing over matter; and in- 
deed, there is on record hardly any positive proof that 



70 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

physical defects, whether of voice or person, have ever 
completely neutralized the effect of eloquent thoughts and 
sentiments, when the spirit that kindles them was really 
in the man, — when the elements of oratory were deep- 
seated in his soul. x Nevertheless it is certain that few men 
even aspire to eminence as public speakers to whom Nature 
has been niggard of the proper physical gifts: and. though 
one may sway the hearts of his fellow-men without a har- 
monious or sonorous voice, an expressive countenance, an 
imposing person, and the other bodily attributes which 
are essential to the full charm of eloquence, yet there is 
scarcely an instance of a man's rising to the loftiest heights 
of oratory without them. 

Again, it is evident that, for temporary success, even 
vulgar qualities may be the most efficient, and the orator 
may owe his triumphs to the use of arts which he secretly 
despises. As immediate influence, not lasting fame, is usu- 
ally the object for which the speaker is striving, he must, of 
course, conform, in a certain degree, to the tastes of those 
he addresses and to the ruling passions of the hour, and 
hence the quality of his appeals must depend, in a great 
degree, upon the intelligence or ignorance, the nobleness or 
vulgarity, of his hearers. The exigences of modern society, 
and especially of modern political warfare, have called into 
being a class of public speakers whose efforts fall as far 
below those of the ideal orator in grandeur and beauty as 
they excel them, occasionally, in immediate utility. It is 
not merely in the degree, but also in the nature of its 
excellence, that the speeches of these two classes differ. 
While with the one class oratory is a severe and exacting 
art. demanding the closest application, and aiming not 
merely to excite the passions or sway the judgment for the 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 71 

time being, but also to produce a deep and permanent im- 
pression, — perhaps to produce models for the delight and 
admiration of mankind, — the aim of the other class is 
simply a temporary effect, an immediate result, to which 
all other considerations are sacrificed. While the former 
speak rarely, and at long intervals, during which they sat- 
urate their minds with their themes, casting their thoughts 
into such moulds as are best fitted to enhance their intrin- 
sic worth or beauty, the latter are always ready with facts, 
arguments, and real or simulated enthusiasm, to champion 
any cause or measure that party interests may require. 
While the speeches of the one class, at once charming by 
their intrinsic beauty, and compelling conviction by their 
power, are a study for the intellect and a pleasure to the 
imagination, and are read and studied for ages as models 
of the oratorical art, as men study the poems of Milton or 
Tennyson, or the paintings of Raphael or Titian, the effu- 
sions of the other, deriving their interest from extraneous 
causes, that cease with the excitement of the hour, produce 
an immediate effect, which is testified by applause or votes, 
but, after a few days, or months, or years, are forever for- 
gotten. It is still true, therefore, that while great influ- 
ence, and even temporary fame, may be acquired without 
the cooperation of all the qualities we have enumerated, 
yet eloquence of the highest order, — the divine art which 
"harmonizes language till it becomes a music, and shapes 
thought into a talisman, " — demands the rare union of 
gifts we have named. 

It is a noteworthy fact that while every civilized coun- 
try and every age of civilization has had its eloquent men, 
the great speakers have generally appeared in clusters, not 
singly, and at long intervals of time. By some mysterious, 



72 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

inexplicable law, the divine afflatus of genius comes rush- 
ing on a particular generation, and a brilliant galaxy of 
orators appears in some country, perhaps in several coun- 
tries, at once. As the great painters and sculptors ap- 
peared together in the Middle Ages. — as the great musical 
composers came in one age, — as the great dramatists of 
English literature belong to one reign, — and as the great 
poets of this century sang together immediately after the 
French Revolution. — so the most illustrious orators have 
blazed out in the intellectual heavens, not at long intervals, 
or as " bright, particular stars," but suddenly and in bril- 
liant constellations. Of these, the most splendid in modern 
times have been those which distinguished the age of Lewis 
XIV and the period of the Revolution in France, the age 
of George III in England, and in America the years of the 
Revolution and the second quarter of the present century. 
Having thus enumerated the qualities which constitute 
the orator, let us proceed to notice some of the principal 
ones more in detail. Of course, it is assumed that he has 
the necessary stock of knowledge, — a proper fund of in- 
formation to draw from, both general and particular, J ^- 
and that with the special information touching his theme 
his mind is saturated. There is no art that can teach a 
man to be eloquent without knowledge, though some de- 
claimed, who appear, in speaking, to have followed Rous- 
seau's receipt for a love-letter, — namely to begin without 
knowing what you are going to say, and to leave off with- 
out knowing what you have said, — evidently think other- 
wise. Cultivation of the voice, memory, and imagination, — 
attention to style, gesture, and all the arts of speech, — can 
only render pleasing or impressive the ideas the speaker 
wishes to communicate: but the materials of his speech, — 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 73 

the facts and ideas themselves, — must be supplied from 
other sources than rhetoric. There is no man who may 
not learn to express, simply and naturally, what is in him; 
but ten thousand teachers cannot qualify him to express 
any more, for " oratory, like painting and sculpture, is 
only a language; it is painting and sculpture made vocal 
and visible." * 

It is hardly necessary to say that among the physical 
gifts of the orator, no one is more important than a good \J 
voice. There is something at once mysterious and marvel- 
lous in the power of that complex structure which we call 
the vocal organs, to move and mould the hearts of men. 
The waves of sound, those vibrating molecules which, strik- 
ing the sensitive membrane of the ear, travel thence to the 
brain, the seat of thought and passion, have a power to 
awaken and compel deep hidden sympathies, which, in its 
magical effects, surpasses any other granted to man. It is 
true that persons skilled in pantomime can communicate 
many ideas, and even complicated trains of thought, by ges- 
tures alone. Among the Romans in the days of Augustus, 
both tragedies and comedies, which excited tears and laugh- 
ter, were acted by pantomime only ; and Cicero tells us that 
there was a dispute between himself and the actor Roscius 
whether a sentiment could be expressed in a greater va- 

* Theodore Parker, in reply to a gentleman who, in 1851, asked by letter 
how he could acquire an impressive delivery, replied as follows: "That will 
depend on qualities that lie a good deal deeper than the surface. It seems to 
me to depend on vigorous feeling and vigorous thinking, in the first place; on 
clearness of statement, in the next place ; and finally, on a vigorous and natural 
mode of speech. Vigorous feeling and thinking depend on the original talent 
a man is born with, and on the education he acquires, or his daily habits. No 
man can ever he permanently an impressive speaker, without being first a man 
of superior sentiments or superior ideas. Sometimes mere emotion (feeling) 
impresses, but it soon wearies. Superiority of ideas always commands attention 
and respect. 11 

4 



74 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

riety of ways by words or by significant gestures. The 
Brazilians, it is said, express and interchange thought to 
a surprising degree by facial motions and gesticulation. 
The fact, however, that such means are little used among 
persons who can communicate with each other by the 
tongue, shows that there is no eloquence like that of the 
voice. The speaking eye, the apt gesture, the written 
word, and the sculptured or painted image are compara- 
tively dead things: it is the voice that has life, — that has 
power to thrill, to exalt, to melt, to persuade, and to appal. 
It is the instrument of passion as well as of thought, and 
is capable of the most wonderful variety of modulations. 
By distinct and significant sounds, corresponding to certain 
signs, the emotions are betrayed; and when these sounds 
reach the ear simultaneously with the appeals of the looks 
and gestures to the eye, the effect is irresistible. Even 
persons who are unaffected by music, are often subdued 
by the gentle accents of the voice, or roused by its deep 
intonations. 

Lord Chatham owed his supremacy in Parliament to his 
voice as much as to his other gifts. William Pitt, at the 
age of twenty-one, ruled the British nation by his voice. 
It was not the comprehensiveness of his reasonings, the 
power of his sarcasm, the legislative authority of his man- 
ner, but the sonorous depths of his voice, — a voice that 
filled the House of Commons with its sound. — that con- 
tributed most to give him the lead which his haughty 
genius knew how to keep. Burke, with a far loftier 
genius, with " an imperial fancy that laid all nature under 
tribute," and a memory rich" with the spoils of all knowl- 
edge, had less influence as an orator, because he lacked a 
voice. He gave utterance to his magnificent conceptions in 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 75 

a sort of lofty cry, which tended, it is said, as much as the 
formality of his discourses, to send his hearers to dinner. 
It has been justly said that the prodigious power of Mira- 
beau was in his larynx. He ruled tumultuous assemblies, 
not by the lightning of his thought, but by the thunder 
of his throat. Who can tell how far O'Connell was 
indebted for his power 'to his wondrous organs of speech ? 
Rising with an easy and melodious swell, his voice filled, 
says Mr. Lecky, the largest building, and triumphed over 
the wildest tumult, while at the same time it conveyed 
every inflection of feeling with the most delicate flexibility. 
The late Earl of Derby, one of the most potent orators 
in the House of Commons, owed his influence not more to 
his force of argument, the exquisite analytical power with 
which he could discuss a question, than to his voice. Full 
and sonorous when deep themes were to be discussed, it 
was at other times almost as musical as the notes of an 
oboe. Mr. Gladstone has a voice as silvery as Belial's. 
When he led the House of Commons, though he spoke 
for hours together, yet no hoarseness jarred the music of 
his tones, and the closing sentences were as clear and bell- 
like in their cadence as the first. A foreigner, who heard 
him speak one night, declared that, until then, he had 
never believed that the English was a musical language; 
but now he was convinced that it was one of the most 
melodious of all living tongues. Nearly all of our great 
American orators have been distinguished by similar gifts. 
Henry Clay's voice had an indescribable charm. It could 
ring out in trumpet tones, or it could plead in low, 
plaintive notes, which pierced and thrilled the hearer 
like the chanting of the Miserere at Rome. It is said that 
he used to utter the words " The days that are passed and 



76 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

gone," with such a melancholy beauty of expression, that 
no one could hear them without a tear. Webster's organ- 
like voice was a fit vehicle equally for his massive, close- 
knit arguments and for his impassioned appeals, and it 
was, quite as much as his majestic presence, one of the 
secrets of his power. It was deep. rich, musical, flexible, 
and of prodigious volume and force. In his famous speech 
in reply to Senator Dickinson of New York, — one of the 
few occasions on which he lost his temper, — when he de- 
clared that no power known to man (to any man but Mr. 
Dickinson), not even hydrostatic pressure, could compress 
so big a volume of lies into so small a space as the latter 
had uttered in a speech which he was even then franking 
all over the country, Webster pronounced the words in 
such tones that one of his hearers declared that he felt, 
all the night afterward, as if a heavy cannonade had been 
resounding in his ears. Again, in his eulogy on Adams 
and Jefferson, when, coming to the climax of his descrip- 
tion of John Adams's oratory, he raised his body, brought 
his hands in front of him with a swing, and, stepping to 
the front of the stage, said, with a broad swell and an 
imperious surge upward of the gruff tone of his voice. 
"He spoke onward, right onward," — he threw into that 
single word "onward" such a shock of force, that several 
auditors, who sat directly in front of the stage, found 
themselves involuntarily half rising from their seats with 
the start the words gave them. The effect was the greater 
because exceptional. The orator had been speaking calmly, 
and rose from the dead level of a passionless delivery.* 

* " The Golden Age of American Orator}'." by E. G. Parker. 

The French critic, Sainte-Beuve, in a fine paper on Montalembert, describes 
his voice, and adds: "I ask pardon for insisting upon these nuances; but the 
ancients, our masters in everything, and particularly in eloquence, noted them 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 77 

The enormous labor which actors and singers bestow 
upon the cultivation of their voices, and its magic results, 
are well known. Three, four, five, and even six years, was 
not thought too long a period for the artists of the golden 
age of song, the eighteenth century, to spend in " making " 
the organ by which they were to win their triumphs. Who 
has forgotten the story of Caffarelli, who, for five out of 
the six years in which he was under the instruction of 
Porpora, practised upon the passages written on a solitary 
sheet of music-paper? M. Legouve, of the French Acad- 
emy, in his amusing and instructive volume on V Art de la 
Lecture, relates a singular experience of Rachel, which he 
had from her own lips. One day she recited some tragic 
passages in the Potsdam gardens before the Emperors of 
Russia and Germany, the King of Prussia, and several 
other sovereigns. " That parterre of kings," said she, 
" electrified me. Never did I find more powerful accents, — 
my voice enchanted my ears ! " A similar incident, in her 
own experience, is related by Madam Talma. She states in 
her Memoirs that one day, when she was personating An- 
dromache, she felt herself so profoundly moved, that tears 
ran, not only from the eyes of all the spectators, but from 
her own also. The tragedy over, one of her admirers 
sprang into her box, and, seizing her hand, said: "Oh! my 
dear friend, that was admirable! It was Andromache her- 
self. I am sure that you imagined you were in Epirus, 

minutely; and a great modern orator has said: "A man's voice is always an 
index of his mind. 1 A mind that is clear, pure, firm, generous, and a little 
disdainful, betrays all these qualities in its voice. Those persons whose voice 
is not the expressive and sensitive organ of these slightest shades of the inner 
man, are not made to produce penetrating impressions as orators." There is 
no doubt that Thomas Jefferson failed as a speaker simply for lack of voice. He 
had all the other qualifications ; but his voice became guttural and inarticulate 
in moments of great excitement, and the consciousness of this infirmity pre 
vented him from risking his reputation in debate. 



78 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

and that you were Hector's widow. 1 ' "I?" she replied 
laughing, "not the least in the world!'' "What, then, 
made you weep?'' "My voice." "How, your voice?" 
" Yes, my voice. That which touched me was the expres- 
sion which my voice gave to the griefs of Andromache, not 
those griefs themselves. That nervous shivering which ran 
over my body, was the electric shock produced upon my 
nerves by my own accents. I was at once actress and 
auditress. I magnetized myself." 

It is a remarkable fact that there are actors moderately 
endowed with mind and soul, who, once upon the stage, 
compel their hearers both to weep and to think. " Why," 
asks M. Legouv£, "is this? It is because their voice is 
intelligent for them. Condemn them to silence, and they 
would fall back into their natural nothingness. It seems 
as if there were a little sleeping fairy in their throat, who 
wakes as soon as they speak, and, touching them with his 
wand, kindles in them unknown powers. The voice is an 
invisible actor concealed in the actor, a mysterious reader 
concealed in the reader, . . . and which serves as blower 
to both." 

The voice being thus the speaker's chief instrument, it 
is hardly possible for him to take too much pains with its 
cultivation. It should be clear, distinct, and full; neither 
squeaking nor harsh, neither a whistle nor a growl, and 
requiring no push by the will; but capable, easily and 
naturally, of all the inflections and modulations, from a 
forte to a pianissimo, which suit the different sentiments it 
may be required to express. It needs, therefore, a system- 
atic and scientific drill, as truly as do the muscles of the 
athlete who would excel in physical exercises. Its quality 
depends, of course, primarily upon the formation of the 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 79 

chest, the throat, and the mouth; but, though art can do 
nothing to change the structure of these organs, it can do 
much to facilitate and strengthen their movements in all 
that regards breathing, the emission of sound, and pronun- 
ciation. Labor strengthens weak voices, renders hard ones 
flexible, softens harsh ones, — acts, in short, upon the speak- 
er's voice as the practice of the art of song does upon that 
of the singer. By dint of painstaking a speaker, like a 
singer, may acquire notes which he lacks. The famous 
vocalist, Madame Mali bran, in singing one day the rondo in 
the Opera of La Somnambula, ended with a very high trill 
upon the r4, after having begun with the low r4. She 
had embraced three octaves in her vocalism. After the 
concert, a friend expressed his admiration of the trill: 
4 'Oh!" was the reply, "I have sought for it long enough. 
For three months I have been running after it. I have 
pursued it everywhere, — while arranging my hair! while 
dressing! and I found it one morning in the bottom of my 
shoes, as I was putting them on!' 1 

The example of Kean, the actor, who had by nature a 
notably feeble voice, shows how much may be accom- 
plished by careful vocal training and cultivation. Talma 
bestowed incredible pains upon his voice. When young 
he stammered, his articulation was indistinct, he was 
quickly fatigued, and his tones were heavy and sepul- 
chral; but so completely did he overcome these defects, 
that no one who heard him in the maturity of his power 
suspected their former existence. When Mr. Walsh, the 
American consul at Paris, heard him utter the words, 
" The iron reign of the people,' 1 he was astonished at 
their effect. Every word seemed a link in a chain-bolt,, 
it was so hard, and solid, and round. Dr. Porter, of 



80 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Andover, the author of an excellent work on Elocution, 
testifies that even in middle life he went to work and 
broke up "a stiff and clumsy pair of jaws"; and others 
declare that " from an effective monotony he passed to a 
range and flexibility of tone adequate to the highest pur- 
poses of the orator." Demosthenes, we know, was un- 
wearied in his efforts to overcome the defects in his 
organs of speech. He had a weak voice, he stammered, 
he could not pronounce the first letter of the word which 
denotes his own profession, the r of Rhetor. — a letter 
which sticks in the throat of many Englishmen and 
Americans.* To remed} T these defects, he practiced speak- 
ing with pebbles in his mouth, ran up-hill as he recited, 
and declaimed on the sea-shore amid the noise of waves 



*M. Legouve, in his recent work on "VArt de la Lecture."' from which we 
have already quoted, tells an amusing story of the way in which an actor of his 
acquaintance conquered this difficult letter. " He was young, he had already 
some talent as an actor, and he was engaged in two pursuits, unequally dear to 
him, but equally difficult: he was laboring at the same time to conquer the 
rolling r, and the hand of a young girl with whom he was desperately smitten. 
Six months of toil had been rewarded with no more success in one case than in 
the other. The r was obstinate in remaining in his throat, and the lady in re- 
maining single. Finally, one day, or rather one evening, after an hour of sup- 
plications and of tender protestations, he touches the rebellious heart; the lady 
says yes ! Drunk with joy, he hurriedly descends the stair-case, and, in passing 
the porter's lodge, he hurls at him a sonorous and triumphant: 'Cordon, s'il 
vous plait! ' (' Open, if you please ! *) The r of cordon has a pure and vibrat- 
ing sound, like an Italian r ! The fear seizes him that perhaps it is but a happy 
accident. He repeats it ; the same success ! He can no longer doubt it ; the 
rolling r is his! And to whom does he owe it? To her whom he adores. It is 
the intoxication of the happy passion which has wrought this miracle! And 
see,— he returns home, repeating all along the way, for he is always afraid of 
losing his conquest: ' Cordon, s'il vous plait! Cordon, s'U vous plait! Cordon, s'U 
vous plait ! ' Suddenly a new incident occurs ; as he turns a street corner, there 
leaps forth from under his feet,— from a hole,— an enormous rat! A rat? An- 
other r\ He adds it to the other; he joins them together; he shouts them to- 
gether: 'Un rat! (a rat) Cordon! Cordon! Un gros rat! (a great rat) Cordon! 
un gros rat! un gros rat! un gros rat!'' And the r : s roll, and the street re- 
sounds with them. He returns home triumphant. He has vanquished the two 
rebels. He is loved, and he vibrates! Let us entitle this chapter: Of the In- 
fluence of Love on Articulation." 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 81 

and storms. All the ancient orators, indeed, whether be- 
cause they had to speak to the multitude, whose senses 
must be struck, and on whom power and brilliancy of 
voice have a great effect, or, because they bestowed far 
more care on all the branches of the oratorical art, at- 
tached far greater importance to vocal culture than 
modern speakers. Quintilian contemptuously dismisses 
those elocutionists who advocate the exclusive use of a 
simple conversational mode of speaking by saying: "It 
was not assuredly in a straight-forward tone of voice 
that Demosthenes swore by the defenders of Marathon 
and Platsea and Salamis, nor was it in the monotonous 
strain of daily talk that iEscbines bewailed the fate of 
Thebes." 

The necessity of careful attention to the cultivation of 
the voice, even by those who care only for rhetorical ef- 
fects, is strikingly shown by its connection with style. \/ 
It has been justly said that a tenor song, though you 
transpose it a fifth lower, will not suit a bass singer; 
and so the style of speaking which may be very effective 
for a man with a shrill, keen voice, may be absolutely 
grotesque if attempted by a man whose voice is rich and 
deep and full. You cannot play on the flute a piece of 
music written for the bass viol. Again, a man who 
speaks always in a feeble, low voice, — so feeble and low 
that " each one of his sentences seems like a poor, scared 
mouse running for its hole," — will come at last to write 
as feebly as he speaks. " Observation," says Professor H. 
N. Day, "abundantly shows how a naturally imaginative 
and highly impassioned style may be gradually changed 
into one that is dry and tame by the continual influence 
of the conviction that we are not able appropriately to 



82 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

deliver strongly impassioned discourse. A conscious power 
and skill to express with effect the most highly-wrought 
discourse will, on the other hand, ever be stimulating to 
the production of it.' 1 There are instances, undoubtedly, 
of weak-lunged speakers, who, owing to a hereditary 
feebleness of constitution, can never, by any amount of 
vocal culture, attain to great vocal power. The example 
of Cotta, however, as he is described by Cicero, shows 
that such need not despair of success in oratory: "As he 
very prudently avoided every forcible exertion of his 
voice, on account of the weakness of his lungs, so his 
language was equally adapted to the delicacy of his con- 
stitution. Though he was scarcely able, and therefore 
never attempted, to force the passions of his judges by a 
strong and spirited delivery, yet he managed them so 
artfully that the gentle emotions he raised in them an- 
swered the same purpose and produced the same effect 
as the violent ones which were excited by Sulpicius.'' 

The defects of a feeble or husky voice may be re- 
deemed, to a great extent, by distinct articulation. The 
part which this quality plays in good oratory, as well as 
in good reading and acting, is immense. Clearness, energy 7 , 
passion, vehemence, all depend more or less upon articu^ 
lation. There have been actors of the first order who 
have had voices as feeble as a mouse's. Monvel, the 
famous French actor, had scarcely any voice; he had not 
even teeth! And yet, according to high authority, not 
only did his hearers never lose one of his words, but no 
artist had ever more pathos or fascination. The secret 
of his success was his exquisite articulation. *" The most 
admirable reader," says M. Legouve\ " I ever knew, was 
M. Andrieux. Yet his voice was more than weak: it was 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 83 

faint, husky, hoarse. . . . How did he triumph over so 
many defects? By articulation. It was said that he made 
himself understood by dint of making himself heard/' The 
same writer adds that there are readers, orators, and actors, 
to whom the very richness of their voices is an inconven- 
ience. As they know not how to articulate, the sound 
devours the word. The vowels devour the consonants. 
Such persons make so much noise in reading and speaking 
that nobody understands them. 

It is remarkable that, dependent as we are upon the 
organs of speech for the communication of our ideas and 
feelings, we know so little of the secret of the working 
of these organs. Anatomists have dissected and laid bare /■ 
all the details of their complex and wondrous structure, — 
they have shown the formation of the larynx, with its 
muscles, cartilages, membranes, and tracery, by which 
the vocal sounds are modulated, — but of the connection 
of these organs with the effect produced, they have told 
us almost nothing. The researches of the subtlest science 
are here unavailing. We know that every voice has its 
natural bell-tone, which makes it a bass voice, a tenor, 
or a soprano, and that between these are various inter- 
mediate gradations; and there our knowledge ends. Of 
all these, the middle voice or tenor, as Bautain observes, 
is the most favorable for speaking, both because it main- 
tains itself the best, and, when well articulated, reaches 
the farthest. The upper voice is undesirable because it 
continually tends to a scream. Only the highest intel- 
lectual gifts, with great personal magnetism and other 
compensations, can atone for this blemish. A bass voice 
is with difficulty pitched high, and continually tends 
downward. Grave and majestic at the outset, it soon 



84 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

grows heavy an' monotonous; it has magnificent chords, 
but, if long listened to, produces often the effect of a 
drone, and soon tires and lulls to sleep by the medley of 
commingling sounds. If coarse and violent, it deafens 
and stuns the ear; and when thundering in a vast build- 
ing in which echoes exist, the billows of sound, reverber- 
ating from every side, blend together, should the orator 
be speaking fast, and the result is a deafening confusion 
and an acoustic chaos. 

The middle voice, for the very reason that it is in the 
middle of the scale, has the largest resources for inflec- 
tion, since it can rise or sink with greater ease than the 
other tones, and thus allow greater play to expression. 
Possessing a greater variety of intonations than the other 
voices, it is less liable to monotony, and holds the atten- 
tion of the hearer, who is so prone to doze. But what- 
ever be the tone of the voice, the most desirable quality 
it can possess for the purposes of the public speaker, is 
to be sympathetic. The great merit of this voice is, that 
not only, by its siren tones, does it propitiate and win 
the hearer in advance, but it exerts a steady fascination. 
a magnetic influence, which draws and fastens his atten- 
tion to the end, as if by some magic spell. " It is a 
secret virtue which is in speech, and which penetrates at 
once, or little by little, through the ear to the heart of 
those who listen, charms them, and holds them beneath 
the charm, to such a degree that they are disposed, not 
only to listen, but even to admit what is said, and to 
receive it with confidence. It is a voice which inspires 
an affection for him who speaks, and puts you instinctively 
on his side, so that his words find an echo in the mind, 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOK. 85 

repeating there what he says, and reproducing it easily 
in the understanding and heart." * 

It is not our business in this work to point out the 
various faults of speakers in the management of the voice, 
such as lack of proper modulation, indistinct articulation, 
speaking too slowly or too rapidly, or in a constant mono- 
tone. All this belongs to a professional treatise. But there 
is one fault so common, especially with young speakers, 
and in our western courts and public assemblies, that we 
cannot forbear noticing it. The great majority, confound- 
ing loudness with force, speak in too high a key. Like 
iEschines, as accused by Demosthenes, when the former, 
at the close of his oration on the crown, bawled and 
mouthed <o P^, y.at f //xts, etfr, they seem to consider elo- 
quence as an affair of the lungs. It is a great mistake to 
suppose that he who speaks in the loudest tones can be 
heard the farthest or the most easily. Gardiner, in his 
" Music of Nature," notes a curious fact in the history of 
sound: — 

k ' The loudest notes always perish on the spot where they are produced, 
whereas musical notes will be heard at a great distance. Thus, if we ap- 
proach within a mile or two of a town or village in which a fair is held, we 
may hear very faintly the clamor of the multitude, but more distinctly the 
organs, and other musical instruments which are played for their amusement. 
If a Cremona violin, a real Amati, be played by the side of a modern fiddle, 
the latter will sound much louder than the former; but the sweet, brilliant, 
tone of the Amati will be heard at a distance the other cannot reach. Dr. 
Young, on the authority of Durham, states that at Gibraltar the human voice 
may be heard at a greater distance than that of any other animal; thus, when 
the cottager in the woods, or the open plain, wishes to call her husband, 
who is working at a distance, she does not shout, but pitches her voice to a 
musical key, which she knows from habit, and by that means reaches his 
ear. The loudest roar of the largest lion could not penetrate so far." 

The same writer states that when Paganini played in 

* The remarks in this and the preceding paragraph, upon the different 
qualities of voices, are abridged from the admirable work of M. Bautain, on 
" The Art of Extempore Speaking.'* 



86 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

England, the connoisseurs did not seek the nearest seats, 
but preferred more retired places, where his exquisite in- 
strumentation overrode the storm of the orchestra. 
-^Besides the difficulty of being heard distinctly, there 
are other objections to using the high notes, except rarely, 
in speaking. Not only do the} 7 " become shrill and harsh by 
excessive use, but the very thought of the speaker may be 
affected by it. The celebrated French advocate, M. Berryer, 
attributes the loss of an excellent law-case to his having 
begun his pleading, unconsciously, on too high a key. 
The fatigue of his larynx communicated itself speedily to 
his temples: from the temples it passed to the brain: his 
mind refused to act with vigor, because its organ was 
overstrained; his thoughts became confused; and the great 
lawyer lost the full command of his intellectual faculties, 
and with it of his case, because he had not thought of 
coming down from the perch to which his voice had 
climbed at the beginning of his speech. 

Some years ago a writer in a public journal, in speak- 
ing of an address read by Dr. Orville Dewey, described 
his impressions thus: "And such reading! quiet and un- 
pretentious, but with such appropriate feeling and intense 
expressiveness! I was not prepared for such a really 
powerfully essay with so little show of power. I better 
understand the mightiness of the still small voice, and 
recognize an oratory in condensed feeling and subdued 
tones, greater than the most showy rhetoric and the 
stormiest bluster."" 

What a pity it is that we have so few such readers in 
our pulpits! The besetting sin of our preaching to-day is 
that it is too declamatory. In nine cases out of ten it 
needs to be more conversational. If you want to speak 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 87 

well, said Brougham to a young Etonian, you must first 
learn to talk well. Not that the heights of eloquence can 
be reached by this style, or that there are not cases where 
the preacher must lighten and thunder as well as plead. 
There are themes which call for denunciation and indig-. 
nant invective, and then only the sharp and ringing tones 
that belong to the upper register will do. Again, a voice 
of mediocre power may captivate senates, but only a mighty 
voice can move a multitude. Of what use would the flute- 
like voice of Everett have been to (VConnell in his " hill- 
side stormings?" Beecher has well said that "there are 
cases in which by a single explosive tone a man will drive 
home a thought as a hammer drives a nail.'" But bursts 
of oratory are necessarily the exception, not the rule, in 
a sermon; moreover, few have the genius for them; and 
therefore we believe that there would be a great gain of 
power, if ordinarily the preacher would simply talk to h\z 
hearers as a man talks to his friend. At any rate, when 
he does pitch his voice on a high key, he should have a 
better reason for so doing than old Dr. Beecher had on a 
certain Sunday. Coming home from church, he said to 
his son Henry, who tells the anecdote: "It seems to me I 
never made a worse sermon than I did this morning. 11 
" Why, father, 11 said Henry, " I never heard you preach so 
loud in all my life. 11 "That is the way, 11 said the Doctor: 
"I always holloa when I haven't anything to say! 11 

It has been justly said by some writer, that almost 
every one is surprised on first hearing Wendell Phillips. 
You are looking for a man who is all art, all thunder. 
Lo! a quiet man glides on to the platform, and begins 
talking in a simple, easy, conversational way ; presently he 
makes you smile at some happy turn, then he startles you 



88 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

by a rapier-like thrust, then he electrifies you by a grand 
outburst of feeling. u You listen, believe, applaud. And 
that is Wendell Phillips. That is also oratory, — to pro- 
duce the greatest effect by the quietest means." We can- 
not all be Phillipses: but we can all copy his naturalness, 
earnestness, and simplicity: and what a gain even that 
would be to the great majority of preachers! Their main 
fault is not that they cannot read Greek and Hebrew, but 
that they cannot read English. As the best music, badly 
played, makes wretched melody, so false or spiritless elocu- 
tion degrades the finest composition to a level with the 
worst, The celebrated Dr. Laurence, the associate of Burke 
and Fox, spoke so badly, in such an unvarying monotone, 
as completely to neutralize the effect which his thought 
and learning were fitted to produce. Fox said that a man 
1 listen, if possible, to a speech of the Doctor's, and 
it over again himself; it must, he thought, suc- 
it was sure to be admirable of itself, and 
oi ^dience. While such are the effects 

of a languid ag delivery, who, on the other hand, 

does not kno\» .eery that lies in a skillful utterance, 

which properly distributes the lights and shadows of a 
musical intonation? By sonorous depth and melodious 
cadences, — by a distinct articulation, which chisels and 
engraves the thoughts, — even the most trivial sentiments 
may be invested with a force and fascination almost irre- 
sistible. As a good singer cares little for the words of a 
song, knowing that he can make any words glorious, so 
the orator can infuse power and pathos into the tamest 
language. There is hardly any person familiar with pulpit 
eloquence who does not know that some of the profound- 
est and most scholarly discourses, — discourses which, when 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 89 

read, seem full of concentrated th ought and vigorous 
expression. — have fallen almost powerless from the lips 
of their authors, while a single verse of Scripture, or a 
line from an old and familiar hymn, coming from the lips 
of another man, has acted like an electric shock, " tear- 
ing and shattering the heart," to use De Quincey's figure, 
"with volleying discharges, peal after peal."* 

Of all the qualifications of the orator which we have 
named, none is more essential than energy, — physical and\y- 
intellectual force. Cicero sums up the whole art of speak- 
ing "in four words, — apiA>~cListmcte, ornate dicere; to speak 
to the purpose, to speak clearly and distinctly, to speak 
gracefully. To-day it is important also to speak with force. 
This is especially requisite to-day, because the age itself 
is full of force, and therefore impatient of feebleness. By 
force we mean the energy (etymologically, the inward- 
workingness,) with which the speaker employs his various 
abilities to make us see and feel that which he would im- 
press upon our minds. It is not a single faculty, but the 
whole strength of his soul bearing upon ours. It was 
this quality to which Demosthenes must have referred in 

* It is a common error to suppose that special attention to elocution leads 
to affectation and mannerism. The very reverse is the fact. Affectation is the 
result of untaught efforts at a late age to rid one's self of the vulgarisms, pro- 
vincialisms, slovenliness, indistinctness, and other faults, of school-boy days. 
The reason why so many persons who study elocution fail to profit by it, is that 
they begin too late. The rustic who late in life apes the gentleman, is sure to be 
affected; not so with him who is "to the manner born."' Let all persons who 
are to be public speakers be trained early and scientifically in the management 
of their voices, as an essential part of their education, — let them be drilled and 
practised for years, till they have acquired the last great art. that of concealing 
art,— and we shall no longer listen to discourses which, like Milton's infernal 
gates, grate on our ears " harsh thunder,' 1 or which, like Shelley's waves on the 
sea-shore, breathe over the slumbering brain a dull monotony, but to a pleasing, 
forcible, and effective delivery, "musical as is Apollo's lute"; and "sore 
throats," the result of unnatural tones and straining, will disappear from the 
catalogue of clerical ills. 



90 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

his reiterated qtvyats, — the "action, action, action," on 
which he laid such stress. A speech may be packed full 
of thought, tersely and felicitously expressed; its facts may 
he apt, its style elegant, and its logic without a flaw; and 
yet if it lack fire and spirit, or if it be tamely delivered, 
it will make but a weak impression. On the other hand, a 
production which is intellectually far inferior to it, — which 
is full of bad rhetoric and worse logic, — which is one-sided 
in its views, and made up of the most hackneyed material, — 
will make a powerful impression for the hour (which is 
commonly the end of speaking), if the orator is energetic, 
and infuses that energy into his performance. As in 
political administration errors and even gross blunders are 
pardoned, if the main end is attained, so a speech ma}' be 
full of faults, and yet be successful, if it be full of energy. 
Force is partly a physical product, and partly mental: it 
is the life of oratory, which gives it breath, and fire, and 
power. It is the electrical element, that which smites, 
penetrates, and thrills. While listening to a speaker who 
has this property of eloquence, " our minds seem to be 
pricked as with needles, and pierced as with javelins." It 
does not necessarily imply vehemence. There may be en- 
ergy, as we shall presently show, in suppressed feeling, in 
deep pathos, in simple description, nay, even in silence 
itself. There is often an appearance of energy where there 
is no reality, — a tug and strain to be forcible, without 
calm inward power. " The aspiration is infinite, but the 
performance is infinitesimal." In the highest examples of 
energy, there is no appearance of exertion: we see only 
power "half-leaning on its own right arm." the Athlete 
conquering- without a visible strain . or contortion. In 
Guido's picture of St. Michael piercing the dragon, while 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 91 

the gnarled muscles of the arm and hand attest the utmost 
strain of the strength, the countenance remains placid and 
serene. 

Demosthenes, if we may judge by an oft-quoted say- 
ing of an enemy, must have had an almost superhuman 
force. " What," exclaimed iEschines to the Rhodians, when 
they applauded the recital of the speech which caused his 
banishment, — " what if you had heard the monster him- 
self?" Lord Chatham's oratory was strikingly character- 
ized by force. A large part of his success was due to his 
imperial positiveness of character. Possessing a vigorous, 
acute, and comprehensive intellect, he saw at a glance what 
most men discover by laborious processes of reasoning, and 
flashed his thoughts upon other minds with the vividness, 
rapidity, and abruptness with which they arose in his own. 
Scorning the slow, formal methods of the logician, he 
crushed together proof and statement in the same sentence, 
and reached his conclusions at a single bound. As John 
Foster said, " he struck on the results of reasoning as a 
cannon-shot strikes the mark, without your seeing its 
course through the air. v Lord Brougham is a yet more 
signal example of this quality in oratory, because he owes 
his victories almost to it alone. Possessing little personal 
magnetism, — at least, of the kind that fascinates and 
charms; careless in his statements, inaccurate in his quota- 
tions, lame in his logic, and intensely partisan in his views; 
displaying little literary skill in the composition of his 
speeches, which, are often involved and sometimes lumber- 
ing in style, and almost always devoid of elegance or 
polish ; addicted to exaggeration and a kind of hyperbolical 
iteration in which there is sometimes " more -potter than 
power " ; he is yet, in spite of these faults, one of the most 



92 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

potent and successful orators of the century, simply because 
of his intense, gladiator-like energy. All his discourses 
throb and palpitate with a robust life. 

Even Chatham and Brougham were, if possible, sur- 
passed in force, — at least, in the union of plrysical and in- 
tellectual energy, — by the master-spirit of the French Revo- 
lution. The orator of all the ages most remarkable for force 
was Mirabeau. It seemed, at times, as if the iron chain of 
his argument were fastened to an electric battery, every 
link of which gave you a shock. William Wirt tells us 
that President Jefferson, who heard Mirabeau while minis- 
ter to France, spoke of him as uniting two distinct and 
perfect characters in himself, whenever he pleased, — the 
mere logician, with a mind apparently as desolate and 
sterile as the sands of Arabia, but reasoning at such times 
with an Herculean force which nothing could resist; and, 
at other times, bursting forth with a flood of eloquence 
more sublime than Milton ever imputed to the seraphim 
and cherubim, and bearing all before him. The same force 
characterized the speaking of Chief Justice Marshall, when 
at the bar. No matter what the question; though ten 
times more knotty than " the gnarled oak," he penetrated 
at once to its core, — to the point on which the controversy 
depended; and seizing the attention with irresistible ener- 
gy, he never permitted it to elude his grasp, until he had 
forced his convictions on his hearers. 

It is to his energy that the so-called natural orator owes 
his power over his fellow-men. It is in his strength and 
intensity of character, — in his determined will, his triumph- 
ant self-assertion, his positiveness and overbearingness, — 
that lurks his magic. By the sheer force of enthusiasm 
and animal passion, — by his glowing periods and "sen- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 93 

tences of a venturous edge," — he rouses audiences to a 
pitch of excitement to which the polished and dainty 
rhetorician seeks to uplift them in vain. Some one has 
said that eloquence is a sort of majesty, a species of 
kingly power; and men acknowledge the mastery of those 
only who have in their natures a strong element of self- 
assertion. The very authority, and even audacity with 
which they affirm a thing, makes half the world believe 
it true. In like manner, the principal, if not the sole 
cause of the success of the radical orator of the present 
day, is his force. "He is a man of one lone idea, and 
if this happens to be a great and fundamental one, as it 
sometimes does, it is apprehended upon one of its sides 
only. As a consequence, he is an intense man, a forcible 
man. His utterances penetrate. It is true that there 
are among this class some of less earnest spirit, and less 
energetic temper; amateur reformers, who wish to make 
an impression upon the public mind from motives of 
mere vanity. Such men are exceedingly feeble, and soon 
desist from their undertaking. For while the common 
mind is ever ready, too ready, to listen to a really ear- 
nest and forcible man, even though his force proceeds 
from a wrong source, and sets in an altogether wrong 
direction, it yet loathes a lukewarm earnestness, a coun- 
terfeited enthusiasm. One of the most telling characters, 
in one of the most brilliant English comedies, is Forcible 
Feeble. Take away from the man who goes now by the 
name of reformer, — the half-educated man who sees the 
truth but not the whole truth, — take away from him his 
force, and you take away his muscular system. He in- 
stantaneously collapses into a flabby pulp." 

It was well observed some years ago, by an American 



94 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

orator who had closely studied his art, that the florid and 
Asiatic style of eloquence is not the taste of the age. 
The strong, and even the rugged and the abrupt, he as- 
serted, are far more successful. " Bold propositions, 
boldly and briefly expressed, — pithy sentences, — nervous 
common sense, — strong phrases,— the felicite aadax, both 
in language and conception, — well compacted periods, — 
sudden and strong masses of light, — an apt adage in 
English or Latin, — a keen sarcasm, — a merciless person- 
ality, — a mortal thrust, — these are the beauties and de- 
formities that now make a speaker the most interest- 
ing." * '* In your arguments at the bar," he says again, 
addressing a young friend, ; ' let argument strongly pre- 
dominate. Sacrifice your flowers, and let your columns 
be Doric, rather than Composite, — the better medium is 
Ionic. Avoid, as you would the gates of death, the repu- 
tation of floridity. Small though your body, let the 
march of your mind be the stride of a seven-leagued 
giant." 

Energy is greatly increased by interrogation. A hearer 
who is listless while assertions only are made, will often 
prick up his ears when he is appealed to by a question. 
Cicero begins his first oration against Catiline in this 
way. and Demosthenes employs this figure with great ef- 
fect in his Philippics, and in the speech on the Crown: 
'■ Will you continue to go about to each other and ask, 
What's the news'? Can anything be more new than that 
a man from Macedonia should subjugate Greece? Is 
Philip dead? No, indeed; but he is ill. What 'matters 
it to you? — to you, who, if he were to come to grief, 
would quickly get yourselves another Philip?" Chat- 

* William Wirt.— " Memoir* »' by J. P. Kennedy. 1849. 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 95 

ham, in one of his superb outbursts, demands, " Who is 
the man that . . . has dared to authorize and associate 
to our arms the tomahawk and scalping-knife of the 
savage?" Cicero tells us that the very enemies of Grac- 
chus could not help weeping, when he delivered this pas- 
sage: "Whither shall such a miserable wretch as I be- 
take myself? Whither shall I turn? To the Capitol? 
But that swims with my brother's blood. Shall I go to 
my own house? Would I not there see my mother, mis- 
erable, wailing, and degraded?" 

Exclamation and apostrophe, which suppose great in- 
tensity of emotion, add very much to energy. To be 
effective, the apostrophe should be brief, and, apparently, 
from the impulse of the moment; else, in the one case, 
there will be no illusion, or, in the other, it will quickly 
vanish. There is hardly any other figure which requires 
so much skill to manage it, or in which failure makes a 
speaker so ridiculous. Among the most celebrated or- 
atorical apostrophes may be mentioned that of Demos- 
thenes to the manes of the heroes who fell at Marathon, 
that of iEschines to Thebes, and that of Cicero in his 
oration against Yerres, in which he describes the cruci- 
fixion of a Roman citizen. There are also striking ex- 
amples of apostrophe raised to vision in the peroration 
of Robert Hall's Sermon on the Threatened Invasion of 
1803, and in the famous passage in Erskine's defense of 
Stockdale, in which he introduces the Indian Chief. 

Gesture is almost essential to energetic speaking; .we 
say almost, for we remember that some speakers have 
made hardly a gesture, and yet have delivered them- 
selves with the greatest excitement and passion, and pro- 
duced a deep and abiding impression. The history of 



96 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

eloquence shows that gesticulation is a most powerful ex- 
ponent of emotion, and may add almost incredible force 
to the utterance of the tongue. Who that has seen a 
Kean or a Siddons, a Clay, a Choate, or a Gough, can be 
ignorant of the increased significance which may be given 
to words by a glance of the eye, a motion, or a wave of 
the hand? Gavazzi moved English audiences by his looks 
and gestures alone. Some fifty years ago there was an 
eloquent Lutheran clergyman in Baltimore whose action 
was so impressive, that a highly cultivated Massachusetts 
clergyman who heard him preach, but who was wholly 
ignorant of the German language in which he spoke, was 
moved to tears. The hearer felt confident that the dis- 
course was upon the Prodigal Son, and, upon leaving the 
church, was told that such was the fact. Daniel Webster 
was usually parsimonious of gestures, but those which he 
chose to make were often signally apt and telling. In 
speaking of the Buffalo platform in 1848, he said: " It is so 
rickety that it will hardly bear the fox-like tread of Mr. 
Van Buren.'' As he said "fox- like tread,'' he held out the 
palm of his left hand, and with the other played his fingers 
along his extended arm down to the hand, with a soft 
running motion, as if to represent the kitten-like advance 
of the foxy advocate upon his rickety platform. A shout 
of laughter testified to the aptness of this sign-teaching. 
The speaker who feels his subject deeply will feel it in 
his very finger-tips. Even the foot, in giving expression 
to violent emotion, or in giving attitude and dignity to 
the figure, is no mean auxiliary to the other organs. 
Among the ancients the supplosio pedis, or stamping of 
the foot, was one of the commonest and most moderate 
gestures. Quintilian even asserts that gesture is com- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 97 

morily more expressive than the voice. He adds that, 
without the hands, delivery would be maimed and feeble. 
Other parts of the body aid the speaker, but the hands 
themselves speak: "Do we not with them ask, promise, 
call, threaten, detest, fear, interrogate, deny? Do we not 
with them express joy, sorrow, doubt, penitence, modera- 
tion, abundance, number, time? And, amidst the great 
diversity of tongues, in all races and nations, is not this 
language common to all men?"* 

Profound feeling or violent passion is rarely satisfied 
with any expression of itself that is possible in mere words ; 
it feels itself to be " cribbed and confined " till it can 
find an outlet in some apt bodily act or emotion. Such 
acts are even more truly than words the language of 
nature, though they may not be as significant. It is for this 
reason that oratory, in its power of expression, is so su- 
perior to all the other arts. Addressing themselves as 
they do exclusively to one or the other of " the two art- 
senses," — poetry and music to the ear, painting and sculp- 
ture to the eye, only, — they must yield the palm to ora- 
tory, which addresses itself at once both to the ear and 
to the eye, and has thus a twofold means of impression. 
Not only is gesture more expressive, in many cases, than 
words, but it is also more rapid and sudden in its effects 
than the aptest language can be. It has been truly said 
that the sidelong glance, the drooping lid, the expanded 
nostril, the curving lip, are more instantaneously eloquent 
than any mere expression of disdain; and the starting 
eye-ball and open mouth tell more of terror than the 
most abject words. M. Charma, in his Essai sur le Lan- 

* For a full treatment of this subject, see the excellent kw Manual of Ges- 
ture," by Albert M. Bacon, A.M., published by S. C. Griggs & Co., Chicago 
5 



98 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

gage, tells an anecdote of the actor Talma, that, disgusted 
at the disproportion of praise which was attributed to the 
words of the poets, by which he produced in the theatre 
such thrilling effects, he one day, in the midst of a gay 
circle of friends, suddenly retreated a step, passed his 
hand over his forehead, and gave to his voice and figure 
the expression of the profoundest despair. The assembly 
grew silent, pale, and shuddering, as though (Edipus had 
appeared among them, when, as by a lightning-flash, his 
parricide was revealed to him, or as though the avenging 
Furies had suddenly startled them with their gleaming 
torches. Yet the words which the actor spoke with that 
aspect of consternation and voice of anguish formed but 
the fragment of a nursery song, and the effects of action 
triumphed over those produced by words.* 

Of course, gesticulation may be overdone, like empha- 
sis, in which case it only enfeebles the thought. To be 
effective, it should be prompt and instinctive, now easy 
and quiet, now strong and animated, but always graceful 
and natural. A single gesture in a passage, if it be apt 
and telling, will often produce more effect than a dozen 
equally significant. Too little gesture is as unnatural as 
too much. It is strange that the happy medium is so 
rarely observed, considering that every child is an illus- 
tration of its proper use, and that we may see examples 
of it in almost every man that talks to his neighbor on 
the street. There are few speakers who do not impair 
the effect of their gesticulation by some excess or man- 
nerism. One orator gesticulates with his left hand 
chiefly; another keeps his elbows pinioned to his sides; 
another enforces his arguments hy pommelling the desk or 

♦"Chapters on Language."" by Rev. F. W. Farrar. D.D.. F.R.S.. p. 67-8. 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 99 

table at frequent intervals; another uses his hands u as if 
he had claws, pawing with them"; another cannot utter 
a sentence without sawing himself backward and forward, 
like the mast of a yacht at anchor; another folds his arms 
over his chest, a la Pitt; another has a trick of rising 
often on tiptoe, as if he had been accustomed to addressing 
his audience over a high wall; another paces the platform 
to and fro, like a wild beast in a cage; and another, 
despairing, after many attempts, of suiting the action to 
the word, thrusts the means of action, his hands, into his 
breeches pockets. It has been observed that young speakers 
are especially apt to overdo in gesture, reminding one, by 
the constant motion of their arms, of the napping of a 
pair of wings. At one of the Intercollegiate Contests in 
the Academy of Music, in New York city, it was noticed 
that some of the students had scarcely advanced to the 
front of the stage, before they went " flying all abroad.'* 
Expression of countenance is essential to energy. Not 
only the hands, but the eyes, the lips, even the nostrils 
should speak, for this is the universal language of nature, 
which needs no dictionary or interpreter. There is a 
tradition that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian ves- 
pers was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the 
hands, — the loquacissimae manus, linguosi cligiti. as Cas- 
siodorus calls them, — being employed. The eye is so 
expressive that it is said that gamblers rely upon the 
study of it, to discover the state of an opponent's game, 
more than upon any other means. No rules can be laid 
down upon this subject; it is enough to say that the 
facial expressions should correspond to the sentiments 
uttered, and this, where there is deep feeling, may safely 
be left to nature. 



100 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Energy depends much upon the choice and number of 
words. Cicero, who loved a copious style, tells us that he 
never heard of a Lacedaemonian orator; and it is certain 
that a succession of epigrammatic sayings, or aphorisms, 
would be a very poor speech. When an orator is full of 
his subject, and his mind is swelling with the thoughts, 
and his soul with the feelings which his theme inspires, 
until there is a fountain-head of ideas pressing at his 
lips for utterance, he will not express himself in a series 
of curt sentences, however pithy or pointed. If there is 
a tide in his soul, there will be a flow in his eloquence, 
and he will not dam it up in pools by too frequent periods. 
Nevertheless, it is a rule, as Southey says, that it is with 
words as with sunbeams; the more they are condensed 
the deeper they burn. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that 
Titian knew how to place upon the canvas the image and 
character of any object he attempted, by a few strokes 
of the pencil, and that he thus produced a truer repre- 
sentation than any of his predecessors who finished every 
hair. So the great orators. Henry, Chatham, Erskine, 
wrought. They grouped instead of analyzing, and pro- 
duced, by a few master-touches, effects which pre-Raphael- 
ite minuteness and laborious finish would have marred. 
This suggestive speaking, which, instead of exhausting 
subjects and explaining everything to death, leaves much 
to the imagination, is demanded now even more imperi- 
ously than in the days of Chatham. Men think and act 
quickly, with all their faculties on the alert; and the 
long-winded speeches and discourses, with endless divisions 
and subdivisions, to which men listened patiently two 
centuries ago, would now be regarded as utterly intolera- 
ble. Let the young speaker, then, prune away all redundant 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 101 

words, all parasitical epithets, using only those that double 
and triple the force of the substantive. Be chary of words 
and phrases; economize them as a miser does his eagles. 
" The people," says a French writer, " affect those thoughts 
that are formulated in a single word. They like such 
expressions as the following, — vive! . . . a has! . . . mort! 
. . . vengeance! . . . liberte! . . . justice! The harangues 
of Napoleon lasted only a few minutes, yet they electri- 
fied whole armies. The speech at Bordeaux did not ex- 
ceed a quarter of an hour, and yet it resounded through- 
out the world." 

An eloquent preacher* has remarked that energy should 
be accrescent. Nothing seizes the attention of an audience 
better than a gentle beginning. Of course, a speaker should 
be in earnest from the very start, his looks, action, bearing, 
and tones of voice all indicating that he has something im- 
portant to communicate, and that he is anxious to communi- 
cate it. Still, " his energy should gradually rise in thought, 
language and manner. His hearers are not prepared to 
sympathize with him at once; and, then, his vehemence 
appears impertinent. It is far better to win their atten- 
tion by a gentler method.; nay, even to lull them, hus- 
banding all our resources of power until their attention 
is fairly enchained, and then to sweep them on with us, o 
never suffering their interest to flag. Some have the talent 
of taking an audience by storm, but it is very difficult to 
keep up the excitement, and, in a failure to do so, the 
thoughts that follow are made to seem weaker than they 
really are, by the contrast. There should be a continual 
ascent to the close, that close being the most impressive 
of all. ... Be sure that the final sentence leaves every 

* George W. Bethune, D.D. 



102 OEATORY AND ORATORS. 

soul vibrating like a swept harp." The famous passage 
on Universal Emancipation in Curran's defense of Rowan 
is a fine specimen of climacteric energy. As sentence 
follows after sentence, each heightens and deepens the 
effect, till the passage closes with the magnificent climax at 
the end, like the swell and crash of an orchestra. Erskine 
was peculiarly happy in thus aggravating and intensifying 
the force of his appeals. As we read his jury addresses, 
we see that he never for a moment dissipates or scatters 
his force, but compels rill after rill, stream after stream, 
of fact and argument, to flow together, "each small, per- 
haps, in itself, but all contributing to swell the mighty 
flood that bursts upon us in the cataract of his conclusion.' ' 
It is said of an eloquent and successful Boston preacher, 
that as he was about to close his discourse, there was no 
such visible gathering up of his forces as pointed to a 
climax, but the result of all he had said was rolled and 
hammered into a few short sentences, shot with the crack 
and directness of a rifle, — and the sermon was ended. So 
cleverly was the work done, that the hearer went away 
with hardly a thought of the preacher or his performance, 
but with a divine thought lodged in his mind, which he 
would carry with him to his grave. 



CHAPTER IV. 

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR {continued). 

A MONG the faculties demanded by the orator, few are 
-*—*- more essential to high success than a lively imag- 
ination. He needs this not only that he may be able to 
fix his plan well in his mind and retain it there, but pa* 
order that he may have clear, distinct, and vivid concep- 
tions of that which he wishes to say, and may be able 
to put both his premeditated thought and any new 
thought that occurs to him instantly into language at 
the first stroke. It must not be supposed that the tropes 
and illustrations which the imagination supplies are 
purely ornamental. The difference between languid 
speaking and vivid oratory depends largely upon the qual- 
ity of the speaker's imagination. The plumage of the 
eagle supports it in its flight. It is not by naked, bold 
statements of fact, but by pictures that make them see 
the facts, that assemblies are moved. Put an argument 
into concrete shape, — into a lively image, or into "some 
hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which men can 
see and handle and carry home, 1 ' — and your cause is 
half won. Rufus Choate used to say that no train of 
thought, is too deep, too subtle, or too grand, for a popular 
audience, if the thought is rightly presented to them. It 
should be conveyed, he said, in anecdote, or sparkling 
truism, or telling illustration, or stinging epithet, — never 
in a logical, abstract shape. 



104 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Aristotle has well said that " the metaphor is the or- 
ator's figure, the simile is the poet's.'" He further ob- 
serves that mere names carry to the mind of the hearer 
their specific meaning, and there they end; but meta- 
phors do more than this, for they awaken new thoughts. 
He might have added that metaphors charm the fancy, 
and are, therefore, a great help to the memory. They 
deepen the impression of the sentiments, and fix them in 
the affections. The superiority, in value, of the meta- 
phor to the simile, for the speaker's uses, is that it is 
swift and glancing, flashing its light instantaneously, 
without ever for a moment impeding the flow of the 
thought. Unlike the thoughts, the tropes and figures of 
the orator are rarely elaborated, but drop spontaneously 
from his tongue in moments of inspiration. He thinks 
in metaphor. He can no more invent them than he can, 
by taking thought, add a cubit to his stature. Of all the 
orators of ancient or modern times, Burke was the great- 
est master of this figure, which he employs sometimes to 
excess. Probably no prose style ever went so near to the 
verge of poetry without going over, as his; "it may be 
said," says Hazlitt, " to pass yawning gulfs ' on the un- 
steadfast footing of a spear'; still it has an actual rest- 
ing-place and tangible support under it, — it is not sus- 
pended on nothing. It differs from poetry, as I conceive, 
like the chamois from the eagle: it climbs to an almost 
equal height, touches upon a cloud, overlooks a precipice, 
is picturesque, sublime. — but all the while, instead of 
soaring through the air, it stands upon a rocky cliff, 
clambers up by abrupt and intricate ways, and browses 
on the roughest bark or crops the tender flower." 
What can be grander than the comparison of the British 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 105 

constitution to " the proud keep of Windsor, rising in 
the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt 
of its kindred and coeval powers," etc. ? — what more 
unique or felicitous than the Abbe Sieyes's far-famed 
" pigeon-holes," or the picture of the Duke of Bedford 
as " the Leviathan, tumbling about his unwieldy bulk in 
the ocean of the royal bounty?" — or what bolder and 
more striking than the application of Milton's descrip- 
tion of Sin, to the half-bright, half-terrible phenomena 
of the French Revolution, which was crowned, as it rose, 
with all the radiance of intellect, but closed in massacre 
and horror? 

Curran was a great master of metaphor. The saying 
of Pericles that " metaphors are often lamps which light 
nothing, and show only the nakedness of the walls against 
which they are hung," had no application to him. Often 
his reasonings were so couched in figures, that if you 
took away the one you destroyed the other. Sometimes he 
seemed for a moment to soar away from his theme in 
flights of imagination; but, however high he flew, he 
always came back to it with additional force, and the im- 
ages he employed not only quickened attention, but lent 
vividness to the ideas he wished to impress. With what 
force and splendor is the thought in the following passage, 
in his defense of Rowan, flashed upon the mind by the 
aptness of the illustration: "This (the origin and object of 
government) is a kind of subject which I feel overawed 
when I approach. There are certain fundamental princi- 
ples which nothing but necessity should expose to public 
examination. They are pillars, the depth of whose foun- 
dation you cannot explore, without endangering their 
strength." How felicitous is the image used by Sheil, 



106 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

when, alluding to the spirit of liberty rising from the 
lower to the upper orders, he says: "At length they have 
learned to participate in the popular sentiment; the spirit 
by which the great body of the people is actuated has 
risen to the higher classes, and the fire which has so long 
lain in the lower region of society has burst at length from 
its frozen summits." Not inferior to this is the fine fig- 
ure of Plunket: "'Time is the great destroyer of evidence, 
but he is the great protector of titles. He comes with a 
scythe in one hand, to mow down the muniments of our 
possessions, while he holds an hour-glass with the other, 
from which he incessantly metes out the portions of dura- 
tion which are to render the muniments no longer nec- 
essary." But none of these flowers of fancy, however 
dazzling or daring, surpass in beauty Daniel Webster's 
imagery, in the famous tribute to the Revolutionary 
Fathers: "They went to war against a preamble. ... On 
this question of principle, while actual suffering was as yet 
afar off, they raised their flag against a power, to which, 
for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, 
in the height of her glory, is not to be compared, ... a 
power which ha? " Hed over the surface of the whole globe 
with her possessions and military posts; whose morning 
drum -beat, following the sun, and keeping company with 
the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and 
unbroken strain of the martial airs of England." 

As nothing is more effective in oratory than imagery, so 
nothing is more dangerous when uncontrolled by good 
sense. Many an orator, in the very whirlwind of his elo- 
quence, has convulsed his hearers with laughter by some 
incongruous metaphor that has dissipated every serious 
feeling, — " bringing down the house " in a way as un- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 107 

pleasant as unexpected. Curran, in speaking of Phillips's 
oratory, in which tropes of every form were mixed up 
profusely and in inextricable confusion, gave a pregnant 
warning to all speakers: "My dear Tom, it will never do 
for a man to turn painter merely on the strength of having 
a pot of colors by him, unless he knows how to lay them 
on.' 1 As the imagination works best in solitude and still- 
ness, it is doubtful whether the din and tumult of the 
present age are not unfavorable to some of the higher 
forms of oratory. It has been said that no man can pro- 
duce poetry at will; he must wait until from a brooding, 
half-idle idleness, it arises, like a gentle mist from a lake, 
delicately and of itself. So with the fine fancies, the ex- 
quisite imagery, of the great orator; only those who are 
withdrawn, during long seasons, into the brooding imagi- 
nation, are favored with them; and where, in this restless, 
hurried, and impatient age, are such to be found? For- 
tunately good taste does not demand that oratory should be 
profusely decked with flowers. Rather should it be like 
" the grave and gorgeous foliage of our resplendent Ameri- 
can forest," full of richness and variety, deriving new 
beauty from the chill influences of a mi" :alistic age, and 
admired less for its scattered hues and tints, than for the. 
combined effect and splendor of the whole. 

It is a truism to say that there can be no eloquence 
without deep feeling. It is not enough for the orator to 
have the ordinary passions of our nature; he must be a 
magazine of sensibility, an electric battery, a Leyden jar 
charged to a plenum. No matter how rare or ample his 
intellectual gifts; unless he have an abnormal emotional 
system united with the mental, — a rare depth and fire 
of nature, a capability of being mightily moved so as to 



108 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

move mightily, an inner power of at once awakening and 
controlling emotion, so that he is able agitatus cogitare, 
and, even in moments of the most fiery passion, to main- 
tain his mastery over the inner storm of being, whose 
forces give fervor and impetus to his eloquence, — he can 
never dominate his fellow men by his oratory. He may 
tickle the ears of his hearers; he may charm men by 
fine displays of imagination, of logic, and of rhetoric; 
but there will be no electric appeals, no fulminating bursts 
of passion, no melting pathos, no sudden and overwhelm- 
ing improvisations in his speeches. The thoughts and 
feelings of a great writer or speaker reach our hearts 
because they issue from his. The bullets, according to 
the huntsman's superstition, are sure to hit the mark, if 
they have first been dipped in the huntsman's blood. 
The cold-blooded, phlegmatic speaker, therefore, whose 
words issue from a frame that has no more sympathy 
with them than has the case of a piano with the music 
of which it is the medium, can have no business on the 
platform. The man who can't put fire into his speeches 
should put his speeches into the fire. When a flabby- 
minded young preacher, who^iad discoursed in old Dr. 
Emmons's pulpit, angling for, a compliment, complained 
at dinner to the Doctor that "somehow he couldn't get 
into his subject,"- — "Do you know the reason, sir?" was 
the caustic reply, — " it is because your subject never got 
into you" The orator who would gain and hold the ear 
of the people to-day, must not only conceive his subject 
clearly, and hold it firmly, but his whole soul must be 
charged and vitalized by it; then, instead of speaking, as 
Strafford said, " from the teeth outward," he will speak 
from the heart and to the heart; and, instead of shun- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 109 

ning his lips, great thoughts will come to them as Goethe 
said that his best thoughts came, " like singing birds, the 
free children of God, crying, ' Here we are ! ' ' 

" Josh Billings," in describing his experience with a 
boil, said that at first he knew he had a boil, but that after 
two days he knew the boil had him. It is not enough 
that the speaker have a subject, however momentous, but 
the subject must have him, if he would storm the hearts 
of his hearers. Lord Erskine has well said that intellect 
alone, however exalted, without irritable sensibility, would 
be only like an immense magazine of powder, if there 
were no such element as fire in the natural world. " It 
is the heart which is the spring and fountain of all elo- 
quence." Pectus est quod facit disertum. Cicero tells us, 
in one of his letters, that in his early career the vehe- 
mence with which his intense interest in his themes led 
him to express himself, shattered his constitution; and he 
was obliged to spend two years in Greece, exercising in the 
gymnasium, before he could engage again in the struggles 
of the forum. Lord Chatham said that he did not dare to 
speak with a state secret lurking in his mind, for in the 
Sibylline frenzy of his oratory he knew not what he said. 
John Wesley once said to his brother Charles, who wished 
to draw him away from a mob, in which some coarse 
women were scolding each other in hot billingsgate: " Stop, 
Charles, and learn how to preach." " I go to hear Rowland 
Hill," said Sheridan, " because his ideas come red-hot from 
the heart."" 

The reason why so many preachers are unsuccessful is 
because they do not feel what they preach. The first ele- 
ment of pulpit power is a face-to-face knowledge of the 
truths to be driven home, — a vivid inward experience 



110 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

pouring itself out in living, breathing, palpitating words. 
Whitefield, in accounting for the feebleness of the gener- 
ality of preachers, attributed it to their coldness. They 
were not flames, but icicles. "I am persuaded," said he, 
"that they talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ; many 
congregations are dead because dead men are preaching 
to them. 1 ' Betterton, the actor, said that the dullness 
and coldness that empty the meeting-house would empty 
the play-house, if the players spoke like the preachers; 
and he told the Lord Bishop of London that the reason 
why the clergy, speaking of things real, affect the people 
so little, while the players, speaking of things unreal, affect 
them so much, is because "the actors speak of things im- 
aginary as though they were real; the preachers too often 
speak of things real as though they were imaginary." 
Nothing can be more true. To be eloquent, a man must 
be himself affected. He must be not only sincere, but 
deeply in earnest. The fire which he would kindle in other 
men's bosoms, must burn in his own heart. The magnetic 
force must saturate his own spirit before it will flow out 
upon those around him. No hypocritical expressions of 
feeling, however passionate in appearance, no simulated 
fervors, however clever the imitation, will work the mag- 
ical effects of reality. The arguments which do not come 
from personal conviction, the words which come from no 
deeper source than the lips, will lack a certain indefinable 
but potent element which is absolutely essential to their 
highest effectiveness. It is not enough that a speaker 
utters profound or weighty truths; he must show by all 
possible forms of expression, — by voice, looks, and gesture, 
that they are truths, living, vital truths, to him. Even in 
discourses of a logical character, where the reasoning ap- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. Ill 

proaches almost to mathematical demonstration, the hearers 
will not be impressed, they will scarcely listen with pa- 
tience, unless they are persuaded that the conclusions to 
which the speaker would force them are the deliberate, 
solemn convictions of his own mind. 

The orator needs to remember that the communication 
of thought and feeling from mind to mind is not a pro- 
cess which depends on a proper selection of words only. 
Language is only one of the media through which moral 
convictions and impressions are conveyed from the speaker 
to the hearer. There is another and more spiritual con- 
ductor, a mysterious, inexplicable moral contagion, by 
means of which, independently of the words, the speaker's 
thoughts and feelings are transmitted to his auditory. This 
quality, — call it personal magnetism, call it a divine affla- 
tus, call it, with Dr. Bushnell, a person's atmosphere, or what 
you will, — is the one all-potent element which, more than 
any other, distinguishes the true orator. It is an intangible 
influence, an invisible efflux of personal power which radi- 
ates from the orator's nature like heat from iron; which 
attracts and holds an audience as a magnet draws and 
holds steel-filings; and no physical gifts, no mere intel- 
lectual discipline, nO intellectual culture, however exquisite 
or elaborate, will enable him to do without it. A speaker 
who lacks this quality may tickle the ear of his auditors, 
and even be praised for his eloquence; but he will never 
take the public mind by storm, or mould and shape men 
to his purposes. He may copy the very manner of other 
orators whose lips have been touched by the divine fire, — 
he may reproduce the very thoughts and language which 
on other similar occasions have thrilled men's hearts; but 
the words which, when spoken by the inspired orator, 



112 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

stirred all souls to their depths, will be hollow, powerless, 
and vapid. The rod may be the rod of an enchanter, but 
it is not in the magician's hand, and it will not conjure. 
On the other hand, one who has this quality, though un- 
lettered and rude in speech, will often, by a few simple, 
earnest words welling from the depths of the soul, thrill 
and captivate the hearts which the most labored rhetoric 
has left untouched. 

We are told that one day a man went to Demosthenes, 
and in a style of speaking void of vehemence and ener- 
gy, that was wholly unsuited to a strong accusation, asked 
him to be his advocate against a person from whom, he 
said, he had suffered an assault. " Not you, indeed." 
said the orator, in a cold, indifferent tone, "you have 
suffered no such thing." "What!" cried the man pas- 
sionately, raising his voice, " have I not received those 
blows?" "Ay, now," replied Demosthenes, "you speak 
like a person that has been really injured." Lord Mans- 
field's great lack as a speaker was a want of feeling. He 
had every - attribute of the orator but genius and heart, 
The intense earnestness of Charles James Fox is well 
known to all. When Sheridan, after passing a night in 
the House of Commons, was asked what his impression 
was, he said that he had been chiefly struck with the 
difference of manner between Fox and Lord Stormont, 
The latter began by declaring in a slow, solemn, drawl- 
ing, nasal tone, that "when he considered the enormity 
and the unconstitutional tendency of the measures just 
proposed, he was hurried away in a torrent of passion 
and a whirlwind of impetuosity," pausing between every 
word and syllable; while the first, speaking with the ra- 
pidity of lightning, and with breathless anxiety and impa- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 113 

tience, said that "such was the magnitude, such the im- 
portance, such the vital interest of this question, that he 
could not help imploring, he could not help adjuring the 
house to come to it with the utmost coolness, the utmost 
deliberation." There is a whole treatise on oratory con- 
densed in Sheridan's discriminating remark, which won 
him Fox's friendship. " I have heard," says Emerson, " an 
experienced counsellor say that he never feared the effect 
upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his 
heart that his client ought to have a verdict. If he does 
not believe it* his unbelief will appear to the jury, de- 
spite of all his protestations, and will become their unbe- 
lief. This is that law whereby a work of art, of what- 
ever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the 
artist was when he made it. That which we do not be- 
lieve, we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat 
the words never so often. It was this conviction which 
Swedenborg expressed, when he described a group of 
persons in the spiritual world, endeavoring in vain to 
articulate a proposition which they did not believe; but 
they could not, though they twisted and folded their lips 
even to indignation." It is to the honor of Daniel Web- 
ster, that if a cause which he argued was bad, he saw its 
infirmity so distinctly that his advocacy proved an injury 
rather than a help to it. But if it was good, or hung 
evenly poised, no sophistry of counsel, no jugglery of 
words, could hide its merits. He held it with a grip 
like that of death. 

It is well known that all great actors, when they have 
succeeded perfectly in their art, have been themselves in- 
fected by the passion the contagion of which they wished 

to communicate to others. For the time they felt as if 
5* 



114 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

they actually were the characters they personated. It is 
said that the tragic enchantress, Mrs. Siddons, from the 
moment she stepped into the carriage which was to take 
her to the theatre, till her return home, felt entirely as 
the person whom she was to represent, and could not, 
without pain, admit into her mind any other feeling. 
John Kemble, her brother, tells us that in one of her 
grand displays of tragic passion, her sweeping gait and 
menacing mien so spoke the goddess, that he was struck 
dumb, — his voice stuck in his throat. For some mo- 
ments he stood paralyzed, and could not force the words 
from his lips. The great French tragedian, Baron, who 
was naturally timid, always felt as a hero for several 
days after he had performed any of the chief characters 
in Corneille's plays. 

All the great productions of literature, all the great 
musical compositions which have entranced the souls of 
men, have owed their enchantment, in a great measure, to 
the profound feeling of which they were the expression. 
When Gray was asked the secret of the inspiration of 
"The Bard," a poem which has a rush and flow like that 
of Pindar's lyrics, he replied: "Why, I felt myself to be 
the bard." On the other hand, the reason why Young's 
"Night Thoughts" fails to impress the reader (especially 
if he knows the author's character) is the lack of genuine 
feeling in the poem. The deep gloom which the poet has 
thrown over his pictures is felt to be a trick of art rather 
than the terrific thunder-cloud, "the earthquake and 
eclipse" of nature; and the diminution of effect is propor- 
tional to what the impression would have been, had his 
exaggerated grief been real. When Handel was interro- 
gated concerning his ideas and feelings when he composed 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 115 

the Hallelujah chorus, he replied in his broken English: 
" I did think I did see all heaven before me, and the great 
God himself." While engaged in the composition his ex- 
citement often rose to such a pitch that he would burst 
into tears. A friend who called upon him as he was set- 
ting to music the pathetic words, "He was despised and 
rejected of men," found him sobbing. "I have heard it 
related," says Shield, ' ; that when Handel's servant used to 
bring him chocolate, he often stood in silent astonishment 
to see his master's tears mixed with the ink as he penned 
his divine notes." We are told that the motion of his pen, 
rapid as it was, could not keep pace with the rapidity of his 
conception. The mechanical power of the hand was not 
sufficient for the current of ideas which flowed through 
that volcanic brain. 

From all this it is plain that the only way to speak 
well in the senate, in the pulpit, or on the platform, is 
to banish every thought of self, — to think only of one's 
subject. The triumphs of true eloquence, touching, grand, 
sublime, awful, as they sometimes have been, are seen 
only when the orator stands before you in the simple 
majesty of truth, and, overpowered by the weight of his 
convictions, forgets himself and forgets everything but the 
truths he has to utter. You think not of who speaks, or how 
he speaks, but of what is spoken ; transported by his pathos, 
your rapt imagination pictures new visions of happiness; 
subdued by the gushes of his tenderness, your tears mingle 
with his; determined by the power of his reasoning, you 
are prompt to admit, if not prepared to yield to, the force 
of his arguments; entering with your whole heart and soul 
into the subject of his address, you sympathize with the 
strong emotions which you see are in his bosom, burning 



116 ORATORY A^D ORATORS. 

and struggling for utterance; and soon find yourself mov- 
ing omvard with him on the same impetuous and resistless 
current of feeling and passion. " It is amazing," says 
Goldsmith, ''to what heights eloquence of this kind may 
reach. This is that eloquence which the ancients repre- 
sented as lightning, bearing down every opposer; this is 
the power which has turned whole assemblies into aston- 
ishment, admiration, and awe; that is described by the 
torrent, the flame, and every other instance of irresistible 
impetuosity/' * 

While deep sensibility is necessary to the orator, it must 
not be overpowering, so as to prevent his self-control, and 
lead to an undignified and theatrical exhibition of himself. 

" Si vis me flere. dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi,*" 

says Horace: that is, -, if you would have me weep" (or, 
" shed tears," or " bewail "), yon must first grieve yourself. 
Bautain observes that this precept is true only for those 
who write in the closet, and does not apply to the orator. 
In this we think he is mistaken, for it will be noticed that 
the poet applies to the emotion of the hearer a stronger 
word, flere, than to that of the actor or speaker, thus inti- 
mating that the latter best achieves his aim by a milder 
exhibition of feeiing than that which he would excite in the 
breasts of his audience. As the prophets of old were not 
allowed to lose all control of themselves, even in their most 
ecstatic moments, so the orator should preserve some self- 
restraint even in his grandest flights. As a rule, he should 
"weep with his voice, and not with his eyes"; and, how- 
ever intense his emotions, restrain them sufficiently, at 

* This paragraph, and a few others in this work, have been transferred, 
with some changes, from " The Great Conversers, and other Essays." by the 
author. 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 117 

least, for his ideas and sentiments to find expression. The 
feelings must not explode at once, but escape little by little, 
so as to animate the whole body of the discourse. 

It is a mistake to suppose that truth to nature re- 
quires that, in the artistic reproduction of her material 
forms, she should be servilely copied. It is the inner 
life, the hidden spirit, that should be sought for in the 
imitation of her mysteries; and therefore the true artist, 
in every attempt to express them, will observe a certain 
reverent modesty and delicate reserve. The Attic artist 
understood this so well, that he made it a law of his art. 
Even in portraying the most violent passions, such as the 
despair of Niobe and the agony of Laocoon and his sons 
writhing in the coil of the serpents, care is taken to 
avoid all offensive literalness and particularity. The 
painter who depicted the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis, 
lavished all the resources of his art on the other figures 
of the group, but hid the countenance of Agamemnon in 
the folds of his robe, leaving to the imagination to con- 
ceive what art was powerless fully to convey. So the 
great orator of Greece was careful, even in his most im- 
passioned bursts, not to " overstep the modesty of nature." 
Even in the very " torrent, tempest, and whirlwind " of 
his passion, he always manifested that self-mastery and 
reserved force, that temperance of action and utterance, 
which are essential to sustained power in delivery. 

It is natural to suppose that it is the thunderbolt of 
eloquence, rather than "the still, small voice," which 
produces the greatest effects upon audiences; but, great 
as have been the recorded effects of some .oratorical ex- 
plosions, it may be doubted whether, after all, it is not 
the subdued expression of conviction and feeling, when 



118 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

the speaker, instead of giving full vent to his emotions, 
is seen laboring with a strong effort to suppress them, 
that is most powerful. There are times when even 
silence is eloquent, — more vocal than utterance, more ex- 
pressive than gesture. The conduct of Job and his three 
friends who sat down together seven days and seven 
nights, no one speaking a word to them, was more elo- 
quent of their woe than all their subsequent complain- 
ings. There are emotions that mock at all attempts to 
give them expression. The Bible refers to a joy un- 
speakable, to groans which cannot be uttered, and to a 
voiceless praise. " Grief has no tongue to proclaim its 
keenest sorrows. Despair is speechless and torpid. Hor- 
ror is dumb. The rhetorical pause is, therefore, founded 
in nature." But when feeling is not too intense for ut- 
terance, the veiled expression of it is often the most ef- 
fective. Who has not felt, at some time, the power of a 
whisper or deep low utterance, distinctly giving forth 
some earnest sentence? Talma, the French actor, de- 
clared that he had studied forty years to be energetic 
without noise. The biographer of F. W. Robertson tells 
us that it was because he was not mastered by his ex- 
citement, but, at the very point of being mastered, mas- 
tered himself. — because he was apparently cool while at 
a white heat, so that he made his audience glow with 
the fire, and at the same time respect the self-possessive 
power of the speaker, — that his eloquence was so con- 
quering. 

We know that in private life a speaker who, feeling 
deeply upon some subject, veils his emotions in part, and 
suffers only glimpses of them to be seen, impresses us 
more powerfully than one who gives loose to a pure and 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 119 

unsuppressed flow of feeling. The mourner who allows 
only an occasional broken sob to escape him, touches our 
sympathies more deeply than if he were to break out into 
loud and passionate wailings and lamentations. It has 
been justly said that the crazy duelist, who was wont to 
break away suddenly from any pursuit he was engaged 
in, as if forced by some demon of passion, and, pacing 
oif a certain distance on the floor, repeat the significant 
words, "one, two, three, fire! he's dead!" then wring his 
hands and turn abruptly to his former pursuits, gave a 
more touching exhibition of the agony which was prey- 
ing upon his spirit, than if he had vented it in constant 
howlings of remorse.* Hence Shakspeare, with that keen 
insight into human nature which characterizes all his 
portraitures, makes Antony betray but occasional signs 
of grief for Caesar's death. Apologizing for any involun- 
tary escape of sorrow, he tells the citizens that he dares 
not trust himself to indulge in an adequate expression of 
his grief: 

" Bear with me; 
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar; 
And I must pass till it come back to me. 

masters ! if I were disposed to stir 
Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, 

1 should do Brutus wrong and Cassius wrong, 
Who, you all know, are honorable men : 

I will not do them wrong ; I rather choose 
To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you, 
Than I will wrong such honorable men. 11 

When a speaker who is deeply moved, using a gentler 
mode of expression than the facts might warrant, appears 
thus to stifle his feelings and studiously to keep them 
within bounds, the effect of this partial concealment is to 
give them an appearance of greater intensity and strength. 

* See Day's •• Rhetoric," 147. 



120 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

In all such cases of obscure and indirect expression of 
emotion, the imagination is called into play; the jets of 
flame that escape now and then, — the suppressed bursts of 
feeling, — the partial eruptions of passion, — are regarded 
as but hints or faint intimations of the volcano within. 
The studied calmness of the speaker's manner and language 
produces a reaction in the hearer's mind, and, rushing into 
the opposite extreme, he is moved more deeply than by the 
most vehement and passionate declamation. There is also, 
as it has been, well observed, the further advantage in this 
partial disguising of passion, that the determination being 
left to the imagination of the hearer, it can never seem to 
him disproportionate. — too weak or too strong. 

The advantage of wit to the orator is obvious. Not 
only does it give a passing relief to the tension of the mind 
that has been plied with declamation or reasoning, and 
thus prepare it for renewed attention, but it is a powerful 
weapon of attack, and sometimes in reply a happy wit- 
ticism neutralizes the force of a strong and elaborate argu- 
ment. A volume of reasoning may be condensed into a 
keen retort, and the absurdity of an opponent's statements 
or logic may be exposed by an impromptu jest more 
effectually than by a series of syllogisms. Many a fallacy 
has been pricked to death by the needle of ridicule, which 
the club of logic has thumped in vain. Some of the greatest 
orators have owed much of their power and influence to 
this talent. Mr. Francis, the author of " Orators of the 
Age," goes so far as to say of J. Milner Gibson, M.P., 
that one witty expression of his, in* which he described 
the Whig ministry, at a certain time, as being made of 
"squeezable" materials, contributed considerably toward 
gaining for him the position he held in the estimation 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 121 

of the House of Commons. The polished irony of Canning, 
more than his powers of reasoning and declamation, was 
dreaded by his antagonists in the British Parliament. It 
was the sarcasm of Pitt, " at once keen and splendid, 
brilliant and concise," which enabled him, while yet a 
youth, to stand up single-handed, and effectually repel 
the assaults of the most powerful opposition ever arrayed 
against a Prime Minister. " He could dispose of an adver- 
sary, 1 ' says a writer, "by a sentence or a single phrase; 
or, without stepping aside, get rid of him in a parenthesis, 
and then go forward to his object, — thus increasing the 
contemptuousness of the expression by its brevity and 
indifference, as if his victim had been too insignificant to 
give any trouble." 

Good sense and wit, we are told, were the great weapons 
of Sheridan's oratory, — shrewdness in detecting the weak 
points of an adversary, and infinite powers of raillery in 
exposing them. These qualities made him a more formida- 
ble antagonist to Pitt than others who had more learning 
and general ability. A fair specimen of his happiness in 
retort was his answer to Pitt when the latter compared 
Sheridan's constant opposition to an eternal drag-chain, 
clogging all the wheels, retarding the career, and embar- 
rassing the movements of government. Sheridan replied 
that a real drag-chain differed from this imaginary drag- 
chain of the minister, in one important essential; it was 
applied only when the machine was going down the hill. 
Curran's wit was so keen-edged, and his humor so rich 
and inexhaustible, fliat he is remembered for them even 
more than for the pathos with which he melted his coun- 
trymen, and the lava of invective which he poured out 
upon the authors of their wrongs. The wit and humor 
6 



122 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

of O'Connell told home upon his hearers as effectually as 
his power of terse, nervous, Demosthenic reasoning, his 
pathos, and the matchless skill with which he condensed 
and pointed his case. 

It was the wit and humor, aided by the good nature of 
Lord North, the Tory minister of England, which enabled 
him, during the disastrous defeats of the American war, to 
bear up triumphantly against the ceaseless and furious 
attacks of Burke, Fox, Pitt, and the other Whig chiefs. 
By a plain, homely answer, says Lord Brougham, "he 
could blunt the edge of the fiercest or most refined sar- 
casm; with his pleasantry, never far-fetched, or overdone, 
or forced, he could turn away wrath, and refresh the jaded 
listeners; while, by his undisturbed temper, he made them 
believe he had the advantage, and could turn into a laugh, 
at the assailant's expense, the invective which had been 
destined to crush himself." Thus, when Alderman Saw- 
bridge presented a petition from Billingsgate, and accom- 
panied it with much vituperation of the minister, Lord 
North began his reply: "I will not deny that the worthy 
alderman speaks the sentiments, nay, the very language, of 
his constituents, " etc. Again, when a vehement declaimer. 
calling aloud for his head, turned round and perceived his 
victim unconsciously indulging in a soft slumber, and, be- 
coming still more exasperated, denounced the minister as 
capable of " sleeping over the ruin of his country, — asleep at 
a time," — North only muttered, " I wish to Heaven I was." 
So when a dull, somniferous speaker manifested a similar 
indignation, because his speech produced its natural effect 
upon the minister, the latter contented himself with ob- 
serving how hard it was that he should be grudged so very 
natural a release from considerable suffering. 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 123 

Lord Erskine added the talent of wit to his other foren- 
sic gifts; and the effect of his sallies, we are told, was not 
merely to relieve the dryness of legal discussions, but to 
advance his cause. On one occasion, he was counsel for 
a man named Bolt, who had been assailed by the opposing 
counsel for dishonesty: "Gentlemen," replied Erskine, "ray 
learned friend has taken unwarrantable liberties with my 
client's good name. He is so remarkably of an opposite 
character that he goes by the name of Bolt-upright." This 
was pure invention. Again, in an action against a stage- 
coach proprietor by a gentleman who had suffered from an 
upset, Erskine began: "Gentlemen of the jury, the plaintiff 
is Mr. Beverley, a respectable merchant of Liverpool, and 
the defendant is Mr. Wilson, proprietor of the Swan with 
Two Necks in Lad Lane, — a sign emblematic, I suppose, of 
the number of necks people ought to possess who travel by 
his vehicles." On another occasion he was employed to 
defend an action brought against the proprietors of a stage- 
coach by Polito (the keeper of a celebrated menagerie) for 
the loss of a trunk. " Why," asked Erskine, " did he not 
take a lesson from his own sagacious elephant, and travel 
with his trunk before him?" 

All the world is familiar with the sarcasms of Disraeli 
(Lord Beaconsfield) ; his hits at Peel as one who had 
" caught the Whigs bathing, and run away with their 
clothes," — as a politician who had always "traded on the 
ideas of others, whose life had been one huge appropriation 
clause," etc. Wit is not merely the handmaid of the 
Premier's genius; it is the right arm of his power. Much 
of its point is due to his by-play, — to the subtle modula- 
tions of his voice, his peculiar shrug, and the air of icy 
coolness and indifference with which he utters his sneers and 



124 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

sarcasms. Nothing can be more polished than his irony; 
it is the steeled hand in the silken glove. Yet, on account 
of its personality and vindictiveness, it cannot be com- 
mended for imitation. As it has been well said, the adder 
lurks under the rose-leaves of his rhetoric; the golden 
arrows are tipped with poison. 

A good example of the effect of a witticism in neutral- 
izing the force of an eloquent appeal, was furnished b}' 
George Wood, of the New York bar, in the great Old 
School and New School case, tried some years ago at Phila- 
delphia, involving the possession of Princeton Seminary. 
The eloquent William C. Preston, of South Carolina, ad- 
dressed the court and jury for three days, in a speech of 
great rhetorical beauty, in behalf of the New School. " May 
it please the court, and gentlemen of the jury, 1 ' said Mr. 
Wood in reply, "if you propose to follow me, you will 
come down from the clouds where you have been for the 
last three days, and walk on the earth." The effect upon 
Mr. Preston's pyrotechnics was like a sudden shower upon 
Fourth of July fire-works. 

It has been said that no speaker can have much influ- 
ence who merely amuses his hearers, — that even in poli- 
tics, the most effective orators are not those who make the 
people laugh. All this is true enough; but if audiences 
do not need to be amused, they need to be kept awake 
and alive; and for this nothing is more effectual than an 
occasional sally of wit. It is said, again, that wit is dan- 
gerous, which is also true; and so is everything that is 
energetic. The cultivation of science is dangerous; the 
practice of charity is dangerous; eloquence is particularly 
dangerous; a dunce is almost as dangerous as a genius; 
nothing is absolutely harmless but mediocrity. It is easy 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 125 

to abstain from excess in the use of faculties which Nature 
has doled out to us with miserly frugality. But that wit 
may give an added charm and zest to eloquence, without 
needlessly wounding men's feelings, encouraging levity in 
its possessor, or mocking at things which should be held 
in reverence, is proved by a long line of examples, begin- 
ning long before him of whom it was said, that 

" His wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, 
Never carried a heart-stain away on its blade," 

and reaching down to some of the most brilliant speakers 
of the present half century. 

Some of the ancient rhetoricians were accustomed to 
insist on vtrttte as an essential qualification of the orator, 
on the ground that a good character, which can be estab- 
lished in no better way than by deserving it, has great 
weight with an audience. This is evidently incorrect; for, 
though it is true that a reputation for uprightness adds to 
a speaker's influence, yet it no more belongs to the orator 
as such, than wealth, rank, or a fine person, all of which 
have manifestly the same effect. But, though not an indis- 
pensable requisite of the orator, there is no doubt that a 
reputation for integrity gives to his words a weight and 
potency which he cannot afford to despise. M. Droz, in 
his Essai sur VArt Oratoire, justly affirms that there is 
no people sunk so low in immorality as to make the reputa- 
tion of him who addresses them wholly indifferent to them. 
There is no deeper law in human nature than that which 
compels men to withhold their respect and confidence from 
one who violates or disregards the primary principles of 
morality. Dr. Franklin was so strongly convinced of this 
that he regarded a reputation for honesty as more im- 
portant to a speaker than even the " action " which Demos- 



126 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

thenes so earnestly emphasized. In his Diary, under date 
of July 27, 1784, he states that Lord Fitzmaurice having 
come to him for advice, he " mentioned the old story of 
Demosthenes' answer to one who demanded what was the 
first point of oratory. Action. The second? Action. The 
third? Action. Which, T said, had been generally under- 
stood to mean the action of an orator with his hands, etc., 
in speaking; but that I thought another kind of action of 
more importance to an orator, who would persuade people 
to follow his advice, viz., such a course of action in the 
conduct of life as would impress them with an opinion 
of his integrity as well as of his understanding; that, this 
opinion once established, all the difficulties, delays, and 
oppositions, usually caused by doubts and suspicions, were 
prevented; and such a man, though a very imperfect 
speaker, would almost carry his points against the most 
flourishing orator who had not the character of sincerity." 
The reason, doubtless, which suggested this advice in 
the present instance, was the character of Lord Fitzmau- 
rice's father, Lord Shelburne, who, though a man of high 
talent, was regarded as insincere. There is no doubt that 
in the long and bitter struggle in the British Parliament 
between Pitt and Fox, it was the superior integrity of the 
former that gave him, in spite of the icy hardness of his 
character, the victory over his antagonist. It was the 
influence which his blameless purity of life gave to his 
words, that made them so potent with the people, and 
enabled him to treat the taunts and reproaches of his ene- 
my with haughty silence, and that superb contempt which 
was so marked a trait of his character. Fox possessed 
many amiable social qualities, warm affections, a placable 
and forgiving disposition, and a sweet and winning temper, 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 127 

which nothing could sour. But, though he was immensely 
popular with his associates, his countrymen generally had no 
confidence in him ; and the effect of his burning and elec- 
trical appeals was to a great extent neutralized, because they 
looked upon him as a reckless debauche, who spent his days 
in drinking and gambling with the Prince of Wales. Even 
those who admired everything in his talents and much in 
his qualities, we are told, regretted that his name never 
ceased to excite in their minds the idea of gamesters and 
bacchanals, even after he was acknowledged to have aban- 
doned their society. Those who held his opinions were 
almost sorry that he should have championed them, when 
they saw with what malicious exultation those who rejected 
them could recite his profligate life, in place of an argu- 
ment, to invalidate their force. It was in vain that he 
gave his days to the serfs in Africa and to the helots in 
America, while he gave his nights to champagne and 
ombre. When in 1782 he was confidently expecting to 
be made prime minister, Dr. Price, who went beyond him 
in his devotion to liberal principles, protested against his 
appointment in a Fast Sermon, which was circulated 
throughout the kingdom. " Can you imagine," he asked, 
" that a spendthrift in his own concerns will make an 
economist in managing the concerns of others? — that a 
wild gamester will take due care of the state of a king- 
dom?" 

It is often said that the weight and pertinency of a 
man's arguments have no necessary connection with his 
morals; that the most illogical reasonings may come from 
the lips of a man of invulnerable reputation, and the 
most triumphant proofs of a proposition be adduced by 
one who is profligate in morals. But daily experience 



128 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

shows that the world reasons differently; and nothing is 
more certain than that one glaring vice in a public 
speaker will sometimes preclude all confidence in his rea- 
sonings, and render futile the strongest efforts of his tal- 
ents. " What care I what you say," exclaims Emerson, 
' ; when what you do stands over my head, and thunders 
in my ear so loud that I cannot hear what you say?"* 
It was said of Sheridan that, had he but possessed trust- 
worthiness of character, he might have ruled the world: 
whereas, living only to dazzle and amuse, he had no 
weight or influence either in politics or life. On the 
other hand, Washington, who had no oratorical gifts, had 
such weight in the Congress that formed the Constitu- 
tion, that when he delivered his opinion in a few pithy 
sentences, the mere declaimers sank into insignificance. 
Baxter, in a passage quoted by Philip Brooks tells us 
that in the English civil wars " an abundance of the ig- 
norant sort of the common people which were civil did 
flock into the Parliament, and filled up their armies, 
merely because they heard men swear for the Common 
Prayer and bishops, and heard men pray that were 
against them. And all the sober men that I was ac- 
quainted with who were against the Parliament, were 
wont to say, ' The King hath the better cause, but the 
Parliament the better men.' " " I suppose," adds Dr. 
Brooks, " that no cause could be so good that, sustained 
by bad men, and opposed to any error whose champions 
were men of spotless lives, it would not fall." Had Lu- 
ther's words been contradicted by his life, they never 
would have rung through Germany like a trumpet, and 
become, as Richter said of them, " half battles."* 

* See. on this subject. " Words; their Use and Abuse," by the author. 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 129 

111 thus enumerating the qualifications of the orator, 
we would not be understood as implying that the essen- 
tial secret of his art can be learned from any such de- 
scription. It is in vain to attempt to explain his mag- 
netism, the mighty effects which he works, by a catalogue 
raisonnee of his qualities. Eloquence, like a genius for 
invention, for music or painting, is primarily a gift of 
God, and we shall never be able to grasp or describe it 
by seizing upon its forms. Like that of beauty, music, 
or a delicious odor, its charm is subtle and impalpable, 
and baffles all our efforts to explain it in words. There 
are persons whose looks and manner charm us at first 
sight; we are drawn to them by an irresistible fascina- 
tion; there is a spell upon us the moment we see them; 
as was said by Saint- Simon of Fenelon, it requires an 
effort to cease to look at them. But in vain would we 
try to analyze the causes of our impressions; we only 
know that there are certain faces with " a witching 
smile and pawky een," that find us all more or less 
vulnerable, though their shafts are shot, so to speak, 
from an ambush. Who can explain the hidden life of 
the rose? The botanist can take the flower to pieces, 
and show you the stamens, calyx, and corolla; but he 
cannot put his finger on the mysterious thing which 
holds them together, and makes the living flower. The 
life escapes his grasp.* Who, again, can explain the 

* Beauty, says Goethe, " is inexplicable; it appears to us as a dream, when 
we contemplate the works of great artists ; it is a hovering, floating, and glit- 
tering shadow, whose outline eludes the grasp of definition. Mendelssohn and 
others tried to catch beauty as a butterfly, and pin it down for inspection. 
They have succeeded in the same way as they are likely to succeed with the 
butterfly. The poor animal trembles and struggles, and its brightest colors are 
gone ; or, if you catch it without spoiling the colors, you have at best a stiff and 
awkward corpse. But a corpse is not an entire animal ; it wants that which is 
essential in all things, namely, life,— spirit, which sheds beauty on everything.' 1 



130 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

mystery of the musician's art? Why is it that the sim- 
plest strains sometimes so thrill and melt the heart? 
How is it that an old song, which we have heard a thou- 
sand times before, can, in certain moods, so joyfully or 
sadly touch our souls. We cannot "pluck out the 
heart" of this mystery? We simply know that there 
is a divine power, an inexplicable sorcery, lodged in this 
art of arts; that by its magical airs and melodies it can 
open the floodgates of the soul, and wet the eye with un- 
bidden tears, or fill the heart with gladness, till joy, like 
madness, pours out its sparkles from the clear depths of 
the eyes. 

So with eloquence. Its subtle spell is alike inexplicable. 
To suppose that it is a trick of language, or look, or ges- 
ture, which one man can learn from another, is an illusion. 
It acts by virtue of some hidden principle, some electric 
or magnetic quality, which is seen in its effects, but which 
utterly eludes analysis. It is not an effect, necessarily, of 
scholarship and polished periods. It does not depend upon 
brilliant rhetoric, a vivid imagination, or upon winning 
looks, or a commanding physique. Nor does it consist of 
"something greater and higher than all these, — action, 
noble, sublime, godlike action.'' Who that has ever lis- 
tened to a mighty orator has not felt how inadequate were 
all attempts to describe him? In vain does one expatiate 
on the beauty or nobleness of his person, his regal carriage, 
his speaking eye, his clarion-like voice, the admirable ar- 
rangement of his arguments, his wit, his pathos, the fluency 
and magnificence of his language, his exquisite observance 
of the temper of his audience. All these qualifications he 
may possess, and we may be sure that all these cannot co- 
exist without constituting a great orator; but when we 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 131 

have said all, we feel that there is something more, — some- 
thing indefinable, and more vital than all the rest, — which 
we have left untold. It is, in short, an inventory, rather 
than a description; "the play of Hamlet with the part of 
Hamlet left out." We have failed as inevitably and sig- 
nally as if we should attempt to portray the matchless 
beauty of the Belvidere Apollo by an enumeration of its 
visible qualities. We might extol its exquisite proportions, 
expressing strength and swiftness, the anatomical truth of 
its attitude, the life-like beauty of its features, and the in- 
imitable delicacy and fineness of its workmanship; and the 
catalogue of its excellences, so far as it went, would be 
faultless; but who that had ever seen the divine original 
would say that we had conveyed even a proximately distinct 
impression of the bounding grace, the matchless symmetry, 
and above all, the air of celestial dignity, which electrifies 
every spectator of " the statue that enchants the world," 
— a statue whose constituent qualities can no more be de- 
scribed than they can be misunderstood by any beholder 
with eyes and intelligence? 

Nor can even the orator himself explain the secret of 
his art. In the work of all the great masters there are 
certain elements that are a mystery to themselves. In the ( 
fire of creation they instinctively infuse into their produc- 
tions certain qualities of which they would be utterly puz- 
zled to give an account. It is so in music, in sculpture, in 
painting, and even in the military art. When Napoleon 
was asked by a flatterer of his generalship, how he won his 
victories, he replied: "Mon Dieu! c'est ma nature; je suis 
fait comme pa (My God, it is natural to me; I was made 
so"). Genius, says a French writer, has its unconscious 
acts, like beauty, like infancy. When an infant charms 



132 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

you by its artless smile, it does not know that its smile 
is artless. The effect which the orator achieves is due not 
merely to his separate gifts, but to their mystic and inex- 
plicable union, and to a certain magic art that works like 
an instinct, — an art by which, like the painter in his 
moments of ecstasy, the poet in his moments of frenzy, he 
flings over his work a light " that never was by sea or 
land,' 1 and "leavens it all with the mystical spirit of 
beauty, and pathos, and power, — like the indefinable light 
which hovers in the eyes of the Madonna of Raphael, like 
the immeasurable power which seems to threaten in the 
frescoes of Angelo." 

The difficulty of discovering the secret of eloquence 
will appear still farther, if we consider the almost infi- 
nite varieties of oratorical excellence, t»he innumerable 
ways in which the enthusiasm of crowds is kindled. The 
eloquence of some speakers, from its first small begin- 
ning to the broad, grand peroration, reminds you of a 
calm and beautiful river, that winds its course unruffled 
by the wind, — now pausing on its pebbly bed, now shoot- 
ing arrow-like along, now widening and swelling into 
deep, lake-like pools, now contracting its deep channel in 
some narrow gorge, till at last it pours its full volume 
into the sea. The eloquence of another is like a mount- 
ain torrent, which, sweeping all obstacles before it, rolls 
on with an impetuous, ever swelling flood, and a loud 
and increasing roar, filling the valleys with its thunders, 
and overflowing its embankments far and wide, till it 
spends its fury on the plain or in some vast lake. One 
speaker appeals to the reason rather than to the pas- 
sions, and seeks to convince rather than to persuade; an- 
other abounds in startling apostrophes and soul-stirring 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 133 

appeals, which the former, in the proud consciousness of 
his argumentative power, seems wholly to disdain. There 
are profound reasoners, who, by the sheer supremacy of 
intellect, by force of will and their own absolute convic- 
tion, implant within us vital sentiments which we cannot 
dislodge, and which send us away thinking, feeling, resolv- 
ing; and, again, there are itinerant preachers, spiritual 
tinkers, and reformed inebriates, who, by the mere force 
of personal enthusiasm, of vehement physical passion, raise 
us to dizzy heights of excitement and draw tears from 
eyes unused to weep. There are speakers who cultivate 
all the seductive arts of address, and who try to propiti- 
ate their hearers by studied exordiums; there are others 
who accomplish equally great, or even greater, results, by 
standing bolt-upright, disdaining all action, making a 
rush at once at the very pith and marrow of the ques- 
tion, and firing off their sentences in short, quick volleys, 
like those of a steam-gun. 

The great orator of Greece spent so many weeks and 
months upon his speeches that his enemies said they smelt 
of the lamp; Webster prepared his immortal reply to 
Hayne in a single night. Lord Chatham, to perfect his 
use of language, read Bailey's dictionary twice over, and 
articulated before a glass ; Patrick Henry affected a greater 
slovenliness of style and rusticity of pronunciation than 
was natural to him, and declared that " naiteral parts is 
better than all the laming upon yearth." The former, 
an inveterate actor, and fastidious in his toilette, care- 
fully adjusted his dress before speaking; the other 
slouched into the legislature with his greasy leather- 
breeches and shooting-jacket. Henry Clay, with the most 
commonplace thoughts, often charmed his hearers by the 



134 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

musical tones of his voice; Brougham electrified his au- 
dience by notes as harsh and hoarse as the scream of the 
eagle. Sheil produced his effects by rapid, electric sen- 
tences, like bolts from a thunder-cloud; still greater ef- 
fects were produced by the " drawling, but fiery " sen- 
tences of Grattan. William Pitt, with a stiff figure and 
a solemn posture, like that of a passionless automaton, 
swayed the House of Commons with stately, flowing, sono- 
rous sentences, in which " a couple of powdered lacqueys 
of adjectives waited on every substantive 1 '; Fox, until he 
got warmed with his subject, hesitated and stammered, — 
often kept on for a long time in a tame and common- 
place strain, — but gaining impetus and inspiration as he 
proceeded, swept the house, at last, with a hurricane of 
eloquence. Hamilton declared that the oratory of the 
former appeared to him "languid eloquence"; that of 
the latter, " spirited vulgarity." The greatest bursts 
of oratory have generally been improvised, and then- 
effects enhanced by apt and significant gesture; but Dr. 
Chalmers, one of the most powerful of pulpit orators, 
spoke from manuscript, and hardly moved a finger. Mira- 
beau, the most stormy, electric, and resistless of French 
orators, pursued a middle course; he took the brief of an 
oration, as he mounted the tribune, from the hand of a 
friend; and many of his best passages, short, rapid, and 
electrical, flashed out from between the trains of argu- 
ments laboriously prepared for him, like lightning through 
the clouds. Such, doubtless, was the case with his com- 
parison of the Gracchi, his celebrated allusion to the 
Tarpeian Rock, and his apostrophe to Sieyes. Burke, be- 
fore the spectre of the French Revolution shot across his 
path, was listened to as a seer by the House of Com- 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 135 

mons; but, after that event, his Cassandra-like croakings 
bored his hearers, and his rising to speak was a signal 
for a stampede from the benches. 

Some years ago " The Editor's Chair " of " Harper's 
Magazine" called attention to the contrast between the 
oratory of Edward Everett and that of John B. Gough. 
Perhaps no speaker in America has been listened to with 
more delight by thousands and tens of thousands that have 
crowded to hear him than Gough. Year after year he 
repeats the same discourses, with slight changes, from the 
same platforms; and year after year men laugh at the 
same "gape-seed" stories, weep at the same tales of pathos, 
and are thrilled by the same vivid appeals to their sensi- 
bilities. Yet Gough has neither literary genius nor cul- 
ture, neither personal magnetism nor a musical voice, — 
indeed, hardly any of the gifts which are deemed essential 
to the popular orator. He has justly been called "an 
oratorical actor, — a kind of Fox-Garrick." On the other 
hand, Edward Everett, who forty years ago was the prince 
of rhetoricians, if not the prince of orators in this coun- 
try, — to whose rhythmical and polished periods the schol- 
arly audiences of New England listened with never-ending 
delight, — was a man of Attic taste and refinement, the 
highest product of New England culture. Cold, passion- 
less, undramatic, trusting to old, traditional, time-honored 
forms in action and delivery, having no deep convictions, 
and consequently abstaining altogether from what Aris- 
totle calls the agonistical or "wrestling" style of oratory, 
he delivered his carefully elaborated periods in tones 
modulated with equal care, and with such a uniform per- 
fection of manner that the whole seemed like the effect 
of mechanism. Yet he, too, drew admiring crowds, al- 



136 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

though a more marked contrast to Gough could hardly 
be named.* 

One of the greatest of modern orators, Lord Brougham, 
lays down as a test of a great mind in the senate, the power 
of making a vigorous reply to a powerful attack. The 
observation appears a just one, for as " iron sharpeneth 
iron," the clash of intellect, like the collision of flint and 
steel, throws out a sparkling stream. Among the distin- 
guished orators of the United States, there have been many 
striking examples of this power, the most notable, perhaps, 
being Webster's reply to Calhoun. Naturally, Mr. Webster 
was of a heav}*, sluggish temperament, and required to be 
assaulted by a formidable antagonist, — to be lashed, and 
goaded, and driven to the wall, by another giant like him- 
self, — to set his massive energies in motion. For the 
ordinary parliamentary duello, — that species of intel- 
lectual gladiatorship which requires that a man should 
have a little of the savage in him, to be very successful in 
it,— he had little taste. But give him a great occasion, 
and an adversary worth grappling with, — a foeman worthy 
of his steel, — and he rises with the exigences of the occa- 
sion, and displays the giant strength of his intellect, the 
fiery vehemence of his sensibility, his brilliant imagina- 
tion, and his resistless might of will, to terrible advantage. 
When thus roused and stimulated, his pent-up stores of 
passion burst forth with volcanic force; he presses into 
his service all the weapons of oratory; the toughest sophis- 
tries of his adversaries are rent asunder like cobwebs: 
denunciation and sarcasm are met with sarcasm and de- 
nunciation still more crushing and incurably wounding: 

* Not having the volume of "Harper" hefore us, we give the comparison 
as nearly as we can recollect it. with, of course, some changes in the language. 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOE. 137 

and his style has, at times, a Miltonic grandeur and roll 
which are rarely surpassed for majestic eloquence. 

Among the orators of Great Britain Lord Brougham 
himself was one of the most remarkable illustrations of 
his own remark. When his faculties were stimulated by 
assault, no man rose more readily with the greatness of 
the occasion, or poured out a more fearful torrent of 
scathing invective, with all the peculiarities of look, tone, 
and gesture, which drive a pointed observation home. His 
enunciation was naturally harsh, yet it was so modulated, 
we are told, that the hearer was carried through a series 
of involved sentences without perplexity, until, at the 
close, the orator literally pierced the intellect by the con- 
cluding phrase, which was the keynote to the whole. In 
days gone by, Brougham and Canning " used to watch each 
other across the table, eagerly waiting for the advantage 
of reply; the graceful and accomplished orator being aware 
that his rival, by a single intonation, or even a pointing 
of a finger, could overwhelm with ridicule the substance 
of a well-prepared speech." One of the most effective 
British speakers in reply at a later day, was Sir Robert 
Peel. His tenacious memory preserved every point of his 
adversary's argument, and his practical intellect enabled 
him to hit an objection " between wind and water/' Lord 
Macaulay, on the other hand, though he always chained 
the attention of the house by his set efforts, could not 
speak in reply. 

That climate and race have not a little to do with elo- 
quence, is an obvious fact. The style called Asiatic, for 
example, is marked, like all oriental compositions, by an 
excess of imagination: the wings are disproportioned to 

the body. Cicero, in speaking of it, says: "No sooner 
6* 



138 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

had eloquence ventured to sail from the Pirseus, than she 
traversed all the isles and visited every part of Asia, till at 
last, infected with their manners, she lost all the purity 
and healthy complexion of the Attic style, and, indeed, 
almost forgot her native language." It is a curious fact 
noted by a late writer, that the climatic conditions of 
extreme heat and cold have a similar effect on the im- 
aginative faculty, causing it to overshadow all the others. 
as may be seen in the poetry of Arabia and Hindostan 
and the Edda of Scandinavia. The Irish and the French 
are born orators; and our own Southern people have a 
great advantage over the New-Englanders. who, as Emer- 
son says, live in a climate so cold that they scarcely dare 
to open their mouths wide. Yet the rule has many ex- 
ceptions, and Nature is perpetually startling us with her 
freaks and anomalies. Who that ever listened to Rufus 
Choate, so oriental both in his looks and style of speech, 
would have fancied, before being told, that he was a 
product of the same rockj 7 " soil as Jeremiah Mason and 
Daniel Webster? Or who would have dreamed of find- 
ing in a child of Maine a genius as fiery and fervid, an 
imagination as tropical in its fruitfulness and splendor, 
as any that blooms in oriental climes? Yet such were 
the qualities of Sargent S. Prentiss, whom, reasoning a 
priori, one would have expected to possess an understand- 
ing as solid as the granite of her hills, and a temperament 
as cold as her climate. So, it has been happily said, " the 
flora of the South is more gorgeous and variegated than 
that of less favored climes; but occasionally there springs 
up in the cold North a flower of as delicate a perfume as 
any within the tropics. The heavens in the equatorial 
regions are bright with golden radiance, and the meteors 



QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. 139 

shoot with greater effulgence through the air; but even the 
snow-clad hills of the North flash, from time to time, with 
the glories of the Aurora Borealis. Under the line are 
found more numerous volcanoes, constantly throwing up 
their ashes and their flames; but none of them excel in 
grandeur the Northern Hecla, from whose deep caverns 
rolls the melted lava down its ice-bound sides.' 1 

If the gifts of the impassioned son of Maine belied his 
birth-place, not less, in an opposite manner, did those of 
Carolina's child, John C. Calhoun. Born in a tropical re- 
gion, where a southern sun is apt to ripen human passion 
into the rank luxuriance of tropical vegetation, he was as 
severely logical, as rigidly intellectual, as if he had been 
reared in Nova Zembla, or any other region above the line 
of perpetual snow. Dwelling amid the luxuriant life, the 
magnificence and pomp, the deep-toned harmonies, of the 
Southern zones, he was as blind to their beauties, as deaf to 
their melodies, as if he had really been "the cast-iron 
man " that he was called, and had sprung from the bowels 
of a granite New Hampshire mountain. 



CHAPTER V. 



THE ORATORS TRIALS. 



TF the orator has his triumphs, which are as dazzling 
-*- as any that are the reward of genius and toil, he has 
also, by that inexorable law of compensation which so 
largely equalizes human conditions, trials which are pro- 
portional to his successes. The hearer who "hangs both 
his greedy ears upon his lips,'' little dreams of the toils 
and mortifications the speaker has undergone. The aspir- 
ants to oratorical distinction, who envy him his fame and 
influence, have but a faint conception of the laborious days 
and sleepless nights which his successes have cost him, — of 
the distracting cares and interruptions, the nervous fears 
of failure, or of falling below himself and below public 
expectation, the treacheries of memory, the exhaustion 
and collapse of feeling, the self- dissatisfaction and self- 
disgust, with which the practice of his art has been at- 
tended. Armies are not always cheering on the heights 
which they have won. " The statue does not come to its 
white limbs at once. It is the bronze wrestler, not the 
flesh and blood one, that stands for ever over a fallen ad- 
versary with the pride of victory on his face." It is a rare 
intellectual gratification to listen to a finished orator; and 
so it is delightful to gaze upon tapestry, and we are daz- 
zled by the splendor of the colors, and the cunning inter- 
texture of its purple and gold: but how many of those who 

140 



THE ORATOR'S TRIALS. 141 

are captivated by its beauty turn the arras to see the 
jagged ends of thread, the shreds and rags of worsted, and 
the unsightly patchwork, of the reverse side of the picture, 
or dream of the toil it represents? Yet it is on this side 
that the artificer sits and works; it is at this picture that 
he gazes, until oftentimes the splendor he has wrought 
becomes distasteful, and he would fain abandon his call- 
ing for one that exacts less toil, even though it wins less 
admiration from the spectator. 

There is hardly any public speaker of great celebrity 
who will not confess that he feels more or less tremor 
when he rises to speak, on a great occasion, — though it 
be for the hundredth time. To stand up before a crowded 
and perhaps imposing assembly, without a scrap of paper, 
without a chair, perhaps, to lean upon, and trusting to 
the fertility and readiness of your brain, to attempt a 
speech amid the profoundest silence, while you are the 
focus of a thousand eyes, and feel, as they scan or scruti- 
nize you, that you are under the necessity of winning and 
holding the attention of all those listeners for an hour, or 
hours, — is a trying task, and demands hardly less nerve 
and self-possession than any other critical situation in life. 
Those who have often assumed such a task, whether vol- 
untarily or involuntarily, will confess that there are oc- 
casions when it is indescribably painful, and that they have 
no remission from either physical or mental suffering until 
it is performed. 

But what is the cause of this anxiety and misery? 
Why should it be so much more difficult to address a hun- 
dred men than to address one? Why should a man who 
never hesitates or stammers in pouring out his thoughts 
to a friend or a circle of friends, be embarrassed or struck 



142 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

dumb if he attempts to say the same things, however suit- 
able, to fifty persons? Why is it that though he is awed 
by the presence of no one of them, and even feels himself 
to be intellectually superior to every individual he faces, 
yet collectively they inspire him with awe, if not with 
terror? How comes it that though he has a steady flow 
of ideas and words when he sits in a chair, he cannot 
think on his legs; that even a half- reclining posture does 
not check improvisation, but perpendicularity paralyzes 
him? Whatever may be the explanation of the phenome- 
non, we are all familiar with it. If we have not had per- 
sonal experience of that Belshazzarish knocking of the 
knees, and that cleaving of the tongue to the roof of the 
mouth, which sometimes afflicts the public speaker in the 
most unexpected and mysterious manner, we have had 
occasion, probably, to witness painful instances of it in 
the experiences of others. There is hardly a more distress- 
ing position in which a human being can be placed, than 
that of the newly-fledged orator, who looks upon " a sea 
of upturned faces" for the first time, and, in a fright, 
forgets what he had to say. He may have repeated his 
speech forty times in his study, in the woods to the trees, 
or in his garden to the cabbages, without hesitating or 
omitting a word; yet the moment he mounts the rostrum 
and faces an audience, his intense consciousness of the 
human presence, of its reality, and of the impossibility of 
escaping it, petrifies the mind, paralyzes all his powers. 

Even the most distinguished orators tell us that their 
first attempts at public speaking were fiery ordeals; and 
not a few broke down opprobriously, " throttling their 
practiced accents in their fears," and losing the thread 
of their thoughts in an access of helpless consternation. 



THE ORATOR'S TRIALS. 148 

The brightest wits have been disgraced in this way as well 
as the dullest. The likelihood of such a result is, indeed, 
just in proportion to the speaker's oratorical gifts. Men 
of the finest genius and the most thorough accomplishment 
in other respects, often fail as public speakers from sheer 
excess of ideas, while a mere parrot of a fellow, with little 
culture and but a thimbleful of brains, "goes off" in a 
steady stream of words, like a rain-spout in a thunder- 
storm. As a crowded hall is vacated more slowly and with 
more difficulty than one with a small assembly, so the very 
multitude of the thoughts that press to the lips may im- 
pede their escape. It is well known, too, that the very 
delicacy of perception, the exquisite sensibility to impres- 
sions, and the impulsiveness, which are the soul of all 
eloquence, are almost necessarily accompanied by a cer- 
tain degree of nervous tremulousness, just as a finely- 
strung harp vibrates at the slightest touch, or whenever 
the faintest breeze passes over it. 

A certain amount of sensibility is, of course, absolutely 
indispensable to the orator, and it is, therefore, a good 
sign when he feels some anxiety before rising to address 
an assembly. The most valiant troops feel always more 
or less nervous at the first cannon-shot; and it is said 
that one of the most famous generals of the French 
Empire, who was called " the bravest of the brave," was 
always obliged to dismount from his horse at that solemn 
moment; after which he rushed like a lion into the fray. 
But while the orator must feel deeply what he has to say, 
his feeling must not reach that vehemence which prevents 
the mind from acting, — which paralyzes the expression 
from the very fullness of the feeling. As a mill-wheel 
may fail to move from an excess of water as truly as 



144 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

from a lack of it, so there may be a sort of intellectual 
apoplexy, which obstructs speech, and renders it powerless 
by the very excess of life. It was, doubtless, for this 
reason that Rousseau could never speak in public, and 
that the Abbe Lamennais, who wrote with a pen of fire, 
never ventured to ascend the pulpit, or even to address 
a meeting of children. 

Kennedy, in his Life of William Wirt, speaks with deep 
sympathy of the agony of a confused novitiate, whom he 
saw arise a second time to address a jury, after having 
stuck fast in his first attempt at utterance. The second 
essay proving equally unfortunate, he stood silent for a few 
moments, and then was able to say. — " Gentlemen, I de- 
clare to Heaven, that if I had an enemy upon whose head 
I would invoke the most cruel torture, I could wish him 
no other fate than to stand where I stand now." Luck- 
ily, — and the fact is full of encouragement to other suf- 
ferers, — the very sympathy which this appeal won for 
him, seemed almost instantly to give him strength. A 
short pause was followed by another effort, which was 
crowned with complete, and even triumphant, success. It is 
well known that Erskine, the great forensic advocate, was 
at first painfully unready of speech. So embarrassed was 
he in one of his maiden efforts that he would have aban- 
doned the attempt to harangue juries, had he not felt, 
as he tells us, his children tugging at his gown, and urging 
him on, in spite of his boggling and stammering. Sheri- 
dan and Disraeli, as all the world knows, " hung fire " in 
their first speeches, and Curran was almost knocked down 
by the sound of his own voice when he first addressed 
his " gentlemen " in a little room of a tavern. The first 
speech of Cobden, also, who became afterward one of the 



THE ORATOR'S TRIALS. 145 

most powerful champions of the Anti-Corn-Law League, 
was a humiliating failure. 

It is said that Canning was sure of speaking his best 
if he rose in a great fright. To feel his heart beating 
rapidly, to wish the floor would open and swallow him, 
were signs of an oratorical triumph. At a Mayor's din- 
ner in Liverpool, he was so nervous before he was called 
on to speak, that he twice left the room in order to collect 
his thoughts. He has given a graphic narrative of his feel- 
ings on making his maiden speech in 1793, when he en- 
tered the House of Commons. It is full of encourage- 
ment to those who are trembling in view of the same 
fiery ordeal: "I intended to have told you, at full length, 
what were my feelings at getting up, and being pointed at 
by the Speaker, and hearing my name called from all sides 
of the House; how I trembled lest I should hesitate or mis- 
place a word in the two or three first sentences ; while all 
was dead silence around me, and my own voice sounded to 
my ears quite like some other gentleman's; how, in about 
ten minutes or less, I got warmed in collision with Fox's 
arguments, and did not even care twopence for anybody or 
anything; how I was roused, in about half an hour, from 
this pleasing state of self-sufficiency, by accidentally casting 
my eyes toward the Opposition bench, for the purpose of 
paying compliments to Fox, and assuring him of my respect 
and admiration, and there seeing certain members of Oppo- 
sition laughing (as I thought) and quizzing me; how this 
accident abashed me, and, together with my being out of 
breath, rendered me incapable of utterance; how those who 
sat below me on the Treasury bench, seeing what it was 
that distressed me, cheered loudly, and the House joined 
them; and how in less than a minute, straining every 



146 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

nerve in my body, and plucking up every bit of resolution 
in my heart, I went on more boldly than ever, and getting 
into a part of my subject that I liked, and, having the 
House with me, got happily and triumphantly to the end." 

Dr. Storrs, of New York, one of the most accomplished 
extemporaneous preachers in America, states that when he 
delivered his first sermon after his installation in Brookh r n, 
he made almost a dead failure. He staggered along and 
floundered for twenty-five minutes, and then stopped. " I 
sank back on the chair, almost wishing that I had been 
with Pharaoh and his hosts when the Red Sea went over 
them! " It is said that a New Hampshire legislator, from 
one of the rural districts, having stuck fast in his maiden 
speech, abruptly concluded as follows: "Mr. Speaker; It is 
pretty generally considered, I believe, to be pretty impossi- 
ble for a man to communicate those ideas whereof he is not 
possessed of," — a proposition which Demosthenes himself 
would not dispute. " My lords," said the Earl of Rochester 
on a certain occasion, "I — I — I rise this time, — my lords, 
I — I — I divide my discourse into four branches.'" Here 
he came to a halt, and then added: "My lords, if ever I 
rise again in this house, I give you leave to cut me off, root 
and branch, forever." When Tristam Burgess, of Rhode 
Island, was making a speech in Congress, he directed his 
eagle eye, and pointed his forefinger, toward his opponent 
on the floor, and, in this threatening attitude, made a long 
and emphatic pause. "That pause was terrible," said a 
fellow-representative to Mr. Burgess after the debate was 
over. " To no one so terrible as to me," responded the 
orator, " for I couldn't think of anything to say." 

That a public speaker in the beginning of his career 
should feel more or less of perturbation on rising to ad- 



THE orator's trials. 147 

dress a public assembly, is, as we have said, no marvel; 
the only marvel is that such embarrassments are not more 
frequent and more disastrous. When we consider how little 
is required to disconcert, and even to paralyze him, — 
a fly on his nose, — a headache or heartache, — the distrac- 
tions which may assail him, and divert his attention, such 
as an appearance of slight in his audience, a cough, a 
yawn, a rude laugh, or even a whisper, — a sudden failure 
of memory, so that part of his plan, perhaps even its main 
division, may be suddenly lost, — the dullness of his im- 
agination, which may picture feebly and confusedly the 
things it presents, — the escape of an unlucky expression, — 
a sudden idea, an oratorical inspiration, which carries him 
far away from his theme, — a sentence badly begun, into 
which he has "jumped with both feet together, without 
knowing the way out," — the inability, while finishing the 
development of one period, to throw forward the view to 
the next thought, the link to connect it with that which 
is to follow, — when we think, too, that any or all of these 
embarrassments may occur to him while all eyes are con- 
centrated upon him, watching his every look and gesture, — 
it seems wonderful that any man, — above all, that a man 
with so extreme a sensibility as the orator must have, — 
should dare to face an assembly. 

Even years of practice in public speaking do not al- 
ways extinguish the timidity which is felt in confronting 
an assemblage of listeners. Cicero, notwithstanding his 
long experience in oratory, does not hesitate to make this 
confession: "I declare that when I think of the moment 
when I shall have to rise and speak in defense of a client, 
I am not only disturbed in mind, but tremble in every 
limb of my body." We are told by some of the ancient 



148 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

writers that he began his speeches in a low, quivering 
voice, just like a school-boy afraid of not saying his les- 
son perfectly enough to escape whipping. According to 
Plutarch, he scarcely left off trembling and quivering- 
even when he had got thoroughly into the current and 
substance of his speech. This may have been owing to 
a naturally weak, nervous constitution, to which also we 
may ascribe the timidity of character which, although on a 
memorable occasion, he could thunder forth, Contempsi 
Catalince gladios, nonpertimescam tuos, yet caused him, in 
the strife of contending factions, painfully to oscillate be- 
tween his regards for Pompey and his fear of Caesar. 
An English reviewer tells of an eminent law-lord, the 
very model of senatorial and judicial eloquence of the 
composed and dignified order, who has been seen to trem- 
ble, when he rose to address the House of Lords, like a 
thorough-bred racer when first brought to the starting- 
post. Even the great reviewer, Jeffrey, once stuck in a 
speech. Being chosen by the admirers of John Kemble 
to present him with a snuff-box at a public dinner, Jeffrey, 
a small man, found himself so overwhelmed and sunk to 
the earth by the obeisances of the tall tragic god, that 
he got confused, stopped, and sat down, without even 
thrusting the box into the actor's hands. 

Patrick Henry often hesitated at first, and had the air 
of laboring under a distressing degree of modesty or 
timidity, which continued to characterize his manner 
throughout, unless he was led to throw it off by some great 
excitement. Dr. Chalmers, though a giant in the pulpit, 
never was able to speak extempore in a way satisfactorily 
to himself, though the cause was not bashfulness, but the 
overmastering fluency of his mind. Thoughts and words 



THE orator's trials. 149 

came to his lips in a flood, and thus impeded each other, 
like water which one attempts to pour all at once out 
of a narrow- mouthed jug. Lord Macaulay, in a letter to 
his sister, says of himself: " Nothing but strong excite- 
ment and a great occasion overcomes a certain reserve 
and mauvaise honte which I have in public speaking; not 
a mauvaise honte which in the least confuses me or 
makes me hesitate for a word, but which keeps me from 
putting any fervor into my tone or my action. 1 ' If ever a 
man spoke as if he never knew fear or modesty, it was 
the late Earl of Derby. Yet he said to Macaulay that he 
never rose without the greatest uneasiness. " My throat 
and lips," he said, " when I am going to speak, are as 
dry as those of a man who is going to be hanged. 1 ' 
Tiernay, who was one of the most ready and fluent de- 
baters ever known, made a confession similar to Stanley's. 
He never spoke, he said, without feeling his knees knock 
together when he rose. A junior counsel once congratu- 
lated Sir William Follett on his perfect composure in 
prospect of a great case. Sir William asked his friend 
merely to feel his hand, which was wet with anxiety. 
A famous parliamentary orator said that his speeches cost 
him two sleepless nights, — one in which he was thinking 
what to say, the other in which he was lamenting what 
he might have said better. Mirabeau, with all his fire, 
dragged a little (e'tait un pen trainant) at the beginning 
of his speeches, and was sometimes incoherent; but, gain- 
ing momentum as he proceeded, he swept onward at last 
with resistless power. Like a huge ship which in a dead 
calm rolls and tosses on the heavy swell, but, as the wind 
fills its. sails, dashes proudly onward, so the great orator 
rocked on the sea of thought, till, caught by the breath 



150 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

of passion, he moved onward with majestic might and 
motion. 

William Pinkney was one of the haughtiest, most self- 
confident, and most vehement of orators; yet, in one of his 
very latest efforts at the bar, when the occasion had drawn 
public expectation toward him, his lips were seen to part 
with their color, his cheeks to turn pale, and his knees to 
shake. He often said that he never addressed an audience 
without some painful and embarrassing emotions at the 
beginning. As he advanced with his speech, these boyish 
tremors disappeared, and he became bold, erect, and dicta- 
torial. Gough is said to be still troubled with the stage- 
fright which he can mimic so well in his lecture upon 
" Oratory,' 1 though he has faced audiences for more than 
thirty years. Rufus Choate would often, before beginning 
a jury address, look as restless, nervous, and wretched as a 
man on the scaffold, momentarily expecting the drop to fall 
under him. Many speakers who have no fears of a fa- 
miliar audience, are yet nervous in a new position. We 
have seen the Governor of a great State, who was perfectly 
at home on the stump, quake like a school-boy when stand- 
ing up before a body of college students whom he had re- 
luctantly consented to address. Lord Eldon once said that 
he was always a little nervous in speaking at the Gold- 
smiths' dinner, though he could talk before Parliament 
with as much indifference as if it were so many cabbage- 
plants. 

Not only courage, but presence of mind, is necessary to 
him who aspires to address public assemblies. Not only is 
he liable to a sudden attack of nervousness, or to have his 
thunder "checked in mid- volley" for want of a word or 
an illustration, but he may be interrupted by an opponent 



THE ORATOR'S TRIALS. 151 

at the very moment when he is seen to be making his best 
point; "ugly," insinuating questions may be put to him, for 
the purpose of disconcerting him ; or a concerted effort may 
be made, by those who dread the effect of his eloquence, to 
silence him, or, at least, to drown his voice by " oh! oh!"s, 
yawns, mock cheers, coughing, hisses, calls to order, or any 
of the other devices which disingenuous opponents know 
so well how to employ. Erskine was morbidly sensitive to 
such annoyances ; and sometimes his suffering was so 
keen as absolutely to paralyze his great powers. Dr. 
Croly, in his " History of the Reign of George III," states 
that the smallest appearance of indifference in the great 
advocate's audience checked the flow of his impetuous ora- 
tory, and sometimes silenced his thunder " in mid- volley." 
Aware of this infirmity, a shrewd opposing attorney would 
plant a sleepy-headed man beneath the Judge, and directly 
opposite the place where Erskine was wont to address the 
jury. Exactly at the moment when the speaker was most 
impassioned, and, working up a thrilling climax, was 
making the deepest impression upon the twelve men be- 
fore him, the sleepy hind would make a hideous grimace, 
and give way to the utmost expression of weariness. An 
effective pause would be broken in upon by a fearful 
yawn; and a splendid peroration would be interrupted 
by a titter in the second row, and the cry of " silence " 
from the ushers at the too plain indications of a snore. 
This would cap the climax of the speaker's misery, and, 
unable to endure the torture, he would abruptly sit 
down. 

Not only was Erskine thus sensitive touching a lack 
of attention by his audience, but he was equally distressed 
by an apparent lack of interest manifested by the coun- 



152 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

sel associated with him in a cause. Noticing on one oc- 
casion the absent or desponding look of Garrow, who had 
aided him in a cause, he whispered: "Who do you think 
can get on, with that wet blanket of a face of yours 
before him?" His first speech in the House of Lords was 
spoiled by the real or pretended indifference of Pitt, who, 
after listening a few minutes, and taking a note or two as 
if intending to reply, dashed pen and paper upon the floor 
with a contemptuous smile. Erskine, it is said, never re- 
covered from this expression of disdain; "his voice faltered, 
he struggled through the remainder of his speech, and sank 
into his seat dispirited and shorn of his fame." On another 
occasion, Pitt rose after Erskine and began: "I rise to 
reply to the right honorable gentleman (Fox) who spoke 
last but one. As for the honorable and learned gentleman 
who spoke last, he did no more than regularly repeat what 
fell from the gentleman who preceded him, and as regu- 
larly weaken what he repeated." Addison tells an amus- 
ing anecdote of a counsellor whom he knew, in West- 
minster Hall, who never pleaded without a piece of pack 
thread in his hand, which he used to twist about a thumb 
or a finger all the while he was speaking; the wags of 
the day called it "the thread of his discourse," because 
he could not utter a word without it. "One of his clients, 
who was more merry than wise, stole it from him one 
day in the midst of his pleading; but he had better have 
let it alone, for he lost his cause by his jest." 

It is said that Daniel Webster once rose to speak by 
request at a poultry show, when a giant Shanghai got the 
floor, and burst forth in so defiant and ear-splitting a 
strain that the orator sat down. It is not every orator, 
even among the veteran practitioners of the art, who can 



THE orator's trials. 153 

preserve his self-command in such moments. Few speakers 
are as ready, when momentarily nonplused, as Curran was 
when he was struggling for an illustration of his client's 
innocence. "It is clear as — as — " (at that moment the 
sun shone into the court) " clear as yonder sunbeam that 
now bursts upon us with its splendid coruscations." Not 
all men have the wit and wisdom of Father Taylor, the 
famous preacher to sailors in Boston. It is said that once 
getting involved in a sentence, where clause after clause 
had been added to each other, and one had branched off 
in this direction, and another in that, till he was hope- 
lessly entangled, and the starting point was quite out of 
sight, he paused, and shook himself free of the perplexity, 
by saying: "Brethren, I don't exactly know where I went 
in, in beginning this sentence, and I don't in the least 
know where I'm coming out; but one thing I do know, 
I'm bound foe the Kingdom of Heaven!" So he "took 
a new departure, and left the broken-backed centipede of 
a sentence lying where it might, in the track behind 
him." Even he, however, was nonplused once. He had 
vividly depicted an impenitent sinner, under the figure 
of a storm-tossed vessel, bowing under the hurricane, 
every bit of canvas torn from its spars, and driving madly 
toward the rock-bound coasf of Cape Ann. "And how," 
he cried despairingly, at the climax of his skillfully- elab- 
orated metaphor, "oh! how shall the poor sinner be saved?" 
At this moment an old salt in the gallery, who had hung 
spell-bound on the orator's lips, his whole soul absorbed 
in the scene, could restrain himself no longer, and, spring- 
ing to his feet, he screamed, — " Let him put his helm hard 
down, and bear away for Squam ! " 

It is related of the witty Scotch advocate, Harry Erskine, 



154 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

that once, when pleading in London before the House of 
Lords, he had occasion to speak of certain curators, and 
pronounced the word as in Scotland, with the accent on the 
first syllable, curators. One of the English judges could not 
stand this, and cried out, " We are in the habit of saying 
c»mtor in this country, Mr. Erskine, following the analogy 
of the Latin language, in which, as you are aware, the 
penultimate syllable is long." " I thank your lordship 
very much,"' was Erskine's reply; "we are weak enough 
in Scotland to think that in pronouncing the word orator, 
we follow the analogy of the English language. But I need 
scarcely say that I bow with pleasure to the opinion of so 
learned a senator and so great an orator as your lordship.' 1 
The coolness and readiness of William Pitt in a sudden 
emergency was strikingly exemplified in his masterly speech 
made in February, 1783, in reply to Fox. In defending 
himself from the personal attack of his great adversary, he 
began quoting the fine lines of Horace touching Fortune 
(Odes, book iii, Ode 29, lines 53-6): 

"' Laudo manentem: si celeres quatit 
Pennas, resigno quae dedit— " 

when suddenly the thought struck him that the next words, 
" et mea virtute me involve-" would appear unbecoming if 
taken (as they might be) for a self-compliment. Mr. 
Wraxall, who was present, says that he instantly cast his 
eyes upon the floor, while a momentary silence elapsed 
which turned upon him the attention of the whole House. 
Drawing his handkerchief from his pocket, he passed it 
over his lips, and then, recovering as it were from his 
temporary embarrassment, he struck his hand with great 
force upon the table, and finished the sentence in the most 
emphatic manner, omitting the words referred to: 



THE ORATOR'S TRIALS. 155 

" Laudo manentem: si celeres quatit 
Pennas, resigno quae dedit (et mea 
Virtute me involvo) probamque 
Pauperiem sine dote quaere'" 

The effect, we are told, was electric; and " the cheers with 
which his friends greeted him, as he sat down, were fol- 
lowed with that peculiar kind of buzz which is a hig]q^r 
testimony to oratorical merit than the noisier manifesta- 
tions of applause." 

Burke, in his early days, before his brain had been 
unhinged by the French Revolution, was sometimes ready 
and happy in his retorts. Attacking Lord North in one 
of his speeches, for demanding further supplies amid the 
most lavish expenditure, he quoted a saying of Cicero: 
" Magnum vectigal est parsimonia," accenting vectigal on 
the first syllable. Lord North, who was a fine classical 
scholar, cried out, impatiently, from the Treasury Bench, 
" vectigal, vectigal!'" 1 " I thank the right honorable gentle- 
man," retorted Burke, "for his correction; and, that he 
may enjoy the benefit of it, I repeat the words: ' Magnum 
vectigal est parsimonia.' " At a later period of his life he 
lost his self-command, and by his irritability of temper 
was placed at a great disadvantage in the " wars of the 
giants." A policy- of systematic insult was employed by 
some of his enemies in the House of Commons, to put him 
down. "Muzzling the lion" was the term applied to this 
treatment of the greatest political philosopher of the age. 
Coughing, ironical cheers, affected laughter, assailed him 
when he arose to speak, which, though he generally dis- 
dained to notice them- at the time, nevertheless soured 
his temper, and sometimes paralyzed his tongue. George 
Selwyn states that on one occasion Burke had just arisen 
in the House, with some papers in his hand, on the sub- 



156 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

ject of which he intended to make a motion, when a rough- 
hewn country member, who had no taste for his magnificent 
harangues, started up and said: "Mr. Speaker, I hope the 
honorable gentleman does not mean to read that large 
bundle of papers, and to bore us with a long speech into 
the bargain." Burke was so suffocated with rage as to be 
incapable of speech, and rushed out of the House. " Never 
before," says Selwyn, " did I see the fable realized of a 
lion put to flight by the braying of an ass." 

There are orators who have so perfect a self-command 
that hardly anything short of an earthquake can disturb 
it. They seem to hold their passions in control by the 
turning of a peg, as did the rider of the Tartar horse of 
the fairy tale, which at one moment dashed through the 
air at the rate of a thousand furlongs an hour, and the 
next stood as motionless as the Caucasus. There are others 
to whom interruptions and attempts to check the impetu- 
ous flow of their speech, appear to be positive blessings. 
Taunts, sneers, hisses, which ruffle and confuse less fiery 
spirits, only put them upon their ' mettle, stimulate them, 
and call forth their latent powers. Like a mountain stream 
which has been dammed, the swelling flood of their elo- 
quence acquires increased fury from resistance, and burst- 
ing through all its restraints, overwhelms everything in 
its path. Such an orator was Lord Chatham. While on 
the one hand he often, by the power of his eye, cowed 
down an antagonist in the midst of his speech, and threw 
him into utter confusion by a single glance of scorn or 
contempt, he himself was only aroused by opposition. Any 
attempt to impede him in the utterance of offensive words 
only called forth a more vigorous repetition of the offense. 
Some of his most brilliant oratorical successes originated 



THE orator's trials. 157 

at moments of overbearing impatience, when he was in- 
fringing on the rules of debate. Murray (afterward Lord 
Mansfield), on the other hand, was greatly wanting in 
nerve, and though the ablest man, as well as the ablest 
debater, in the House of Commons, according to Lord 
Waldegrave, bore in agitated silence the assaults of Pitt 
(afterward Lord Chatham), to which he did not dare to 
reply. Butler states, in his " Reminiscences," that on one 
occasion, after Murray had suffered for some time, Pitt 
stopped, threw his eyes around, then fixing their whole 
power on his opponent, said: "I must now address a few 
words to Mr. Solicitor: they shall be few, but they shall 
be daggers." Murray was agitated; the look was con- 
tinued; the agitation increased. "Felix trembles," ex- 
claimed Pitt: "he shall hear me some other day." He 
sat down; Murray made no reply, and a languid debate 
is said to have shown the paralysis of the House. 

Mirabeau, who in physical gifts strongly resembled 
Chatham, owed likewise many of his oratorical triumphs 
to opposition. It has been justly said that in retort, in 
that kind of abrupt, indignant, disdainful repartee which 
crushes its victim as by a blow, he was, like Chatham, 
surpassed by none of his contemporaries, and, like Chat- 
ham, too, he was peculiarly dexterous in converting a 
taunt into a victorious rebuke. Patrick Henry, even in 
his most fiery moments, equally retained his self-posses- 
sion. His coolness under trying circumstances, when 
speaking against the Stamp Act in the Virginia House of 
Burgesses, is familiar to all Americans. As he uttered 
the celebrated passage: "Caesar had his Brutus, — Charles 
the First his Cromwell, — and George the Third" — the 
cry of " Treason ! " was heard from the speaker, and 



158 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

"Treason, treason !" was echoed from every part of the 
House. " It was one of those trying moments," says Mr. 
Wirt, Henry's biographer, "which are decisive of charac- 
ter. Henry faltered not for an instant: but rising to a 
loftier attitude, and fixing on the speaker an eye of the 
most determined fire, he finished his sentence with the 
firmest emphasis, — ' may profit by their example. If this 
be treason, make the mpst of it.' " One of the neatest 
retorts ever made by a public speaker, was that made 
by Coleridge to some marks of disapprobation during his 
democratic lectures at Bristol: "I am not at all surprised 
that, when the red-hot prejudices of aristocrats are sud- 
denly plunged into the cool element of reason, they should 
go off with a hiss."* 

In this account of the orator's trials we have men- 
tioned only some of the most obvious ones. We have 
said nothing of the ever-vaiying moods of feeling to 
which a person of so much sensibility is inevitably sub- 
ject, and which make him more or less the puppet of 
circumstances. There are moments when he feels him- 

* Happy as was this reply, it was surpassed in overwhelming effect by a 
somewhat irreverent one made by that brilliant but erratic orator, the late 
Thomas Marshall, of Kentucky. Toward the close of his life, when, unfortu- 
nately, his oratorical inspiration was too often artificial, he was making a speech 
to a crowded audience at Buffalo, when he was interrupted by a political oppo- 
nent, who, pretending not to hear distinctly, tried to embarrass him by putting 
his hand to his ear and crying out "Louder!"'' Mr. Marshall, thereupon, 
pitched his voice several times on a higher and yet higher key; but the only 
effect on his tormentor was to draw forth a still more energetic cry of " Louder! 
please, sir, louder! " At last, being interrupted for the fourth time and in the 
midst of one of his most thrilling appeals, Mr. Marshall, indignant at the trick, 
as he now discovered it to be, paused for a moment, and fixing his eye first on 
his enemy and then on the presiding officer, said: t; Mr. President, on the last 
day, when the angel Gabriel shall have descended from the heavens, and, plac- 
ing one foot upon the sea and the other upon the land, shall lift to his lips the 
golden trumpet, and proclaim to the living and to the resurrected dead that time 
shall be no more, I have no doubt, sir, that some infernal fool from Buffalo will 
start up and cry out, 'Louder, please, sir, louder/ ' " 



THE ORATOR'S TRIALS. 159 

self in quick electrical sympathy with his audience, and 
every breath and current of thought and feeling by 
which it is affected, sweeps through his own soul, — when 
he feels a stream of mental influence from every person 
that he addresses, as potent and stimulating as if they 
were all so many galvanic batteries, with their wires of 
communication concentring in his own bosom. There 
are other times when he feels himself so repelled and 
chilled by the cold, stern gaze of the faces before him, 
that all his faculties are benumbed. There are moments 
of inspiration when he feels a kind of divine afflatus, and, 
instead of making an effort to speak, he seems to be 
spoken from; his soul is so flooded with emotion, that he 
seems to be lifted off his feet, and to tread on air. He 
speaks at such times in a kind of ecstasy or rapture, and 
hours may pass without any consciousness of fatigue. There 
are other moments when his thoughts and ideas, instead 
of flowing apparently from an inexhaustible fountain, can 
only be pumped up with great effort; when expression 
and illustration, instead of flocking to his lips, seem to 
fly from them. Again, how often when he has carefully 
prepared a speech, does he have to wait for an oppor- 
tunity to deliver it, till the fire and glow that attended 
its preparation have become extinct! How often do the 
happiest ideas and illustrations flash upon him after he 
has sat down! He could pulverize his adversary were 
the debate to be repeated, but his crushing arguments 
have presented themselves too late. William Wirt had 
once an afflicting experience of this kind, which, with 
others that might be cited, tends to show that oratorical 
victories are due to sudden inspirations, to opportunity or 
luck, as often as victories in the field. " Had the cause 



160 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

been to argue over again on the next day," he wrote to 
a friend, after having grappled with Pinkney, " I could 
have shivered him, for his discussion revived all my for- 
gotten topics, and, as I lay in my bed on the following 
morning, arguments poured themselves out before me as 
a cornucopia. I should have wept at the consideration of 
what I had lost, if I had not prevented it by leaping out 
of bed, and beginning to sing and dance like a maniac." 

It will be seen hy these examples that there are oc- 
casions when courage, coolness, presence of mind, and 
promptness of decision are required of the orator as 
truly as of the general on the field of battle. Especially 
does he require them on field-days, in parliamentary du- 
ellos, in the hand-to-hand encounter of intellects, where 
the home thrust is often so suddenly given. At such times, 
it is not enough to be endowed with the rarest intel- 
lectual gifts, unless he is able also to command his whole 
intellectual force the moment he wants to use it. We 
believe, therefore, that there is no grander manifestation 
of the power of the human mind, than that of an orator 
launched suddenly, without warning, on the ocean of im- 
provisation, and spreading his sails to the breeze; coolly 
yet instantaneously deciding upon his course, and earnestly 
and even passionately pursuing it; at the same moment 
guiding his bark amid the rocks and quicksands on the 
way, and forecasting his future course; now seemingly 
overwhelmed in a storm of interruption, yet rising stronger 
from opposition; now suddenly collecting his forces in an 
interval of applause, battling with and conquering both 
himself and his audience, and mounting triumphantly bil- 
low after billow, until with his auditory he reaches the 
haven on which his longing eye has been fixed. 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE ORATOR S HELPS. 



AS language is the orator's principal instrument of con- 
-+-H- viction and persuasion, it is evident that a perfect 
command of it is absolutely indispensable to the highest 
success. It is evident, too, that such a command does not 
come by instinct or inspiration, but must be gained by dint 
of study and painstaking. The power of speaking in clear, 
vigorous, racy, picturesque, and musical English, — of em- 
ploying the " aptest words in the aptest places," — demands 
of him who would possess himself of it, as careful and per- 
sistent culture as that of sounding the depths of metaphys- 
ics, or of solving the toughest mathematical problems. But 
how shall this power be acquired? We answer, partly by 
the constant practice of composition with the pen (of which 
we shall speak more at length further on), and partly in 
two other ways, viz., by reading and translation. Next in 
value to the frequent use of the pen, is the practice of care- 
fully reading and re-reading the best prose writers and 
poets, and committing their finest passages to memory, so 
as to be able to repeat them at any moment without effort. 
The advantages of this practice are that it not only 
strengthens the memory, but fills and fertilizes the mind 
with pregnant and suggestive thoughts, expressed in the 
happiest language, stores it with graceful images, and, 

above all, forms the ear to the rhythm and number of 

7* 161 



162 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

the period, which add so much to its impressiveness and 
force. 

If we study the masterpieces of eloquence we shall find 
that it is in a large measure to the rhythmus, the harmony 
of the sentences, that many of the most striking passages 
owe their effect. The ancient orators paid especial atten- 
tion to this point. They bestowed incredible pains not only 
upon the choice of words, but upon their metrical arrange- 
ment, so that they might fall most pleasingly upon the ear. 
Cicero quotes half-a-dozen words from a speech of Carbo, 
which were so exquisitely selected and collocated that they 
almost brought his hearers to their feet. It may be thought 
that so much attention to form may distract the speaker 
from proper attention to the substance of his discourse, 
and tempt him to sacrifice sense to sound ; and such, indeed, 
was the effect in the times that succeeded the dissolution 
of the Roman Republic. Quintilian states that it was the 
ridiculous boast of certain orators in the days of the 
declension of genuine eloquence, that their harangues 
were capable of being set to music, and sung upon the 
stage. So far was this affectation carried by the younger 
Gracchus, that when he harangued the populace, he used 
to employ a skillful flute-player, to stand behind him in 
a position where he could not be observed, and, by the 
tones of his instrument, regulate the proper pitch of his 
voice! It was this depravity of taste which gave rise to 
what Tacitus calls " the very indecent and preposterous, 
though very frequent expression, " that such an orator 
speaks smoothly, and that such a dancer moves eloquently. 
But the abuse of an art is no argument against its use. 
The example of the Prince of Orators shows that, m cul- 
tivating the form, we need not separate it from the sub- 



THE orator's helps. 163 

stance; that this is not true art, but the want of art, 
since for true art the most perfect form is nothing less 
than the clearest and most transparent appearance of the 
substance. 

It is the melody of a sentence which, so to speak, makes 
it cut, — which gives it speedy entrance into the mind, 
causes it to penetrate deeply, and to exercise a magic 
power over the heart. It is not enough that the speak- 
er's utterances impress the mind of the hearer; they 
should ring in his ears; they should appeal to the senses, 
as well as to the feelings, the imagination, and the intel- 
lect; then, when they seize at once on the whole man, 
on body, soul, and spirit, will they " swell in the heart, 
and kindle in the eyes," and constrain him, he knows 
not why, to believe and to obey. Let the student of 
oratory, then, brood over the finest passages of English 
composition, both prose and poetry, in his leisure hours, 
till his mind is surcharged with them; let him read and 
re-read the ever- varied verse of Shakspeare, the majestic 
and pregnant lines of Milton, the harmonious and ca- 
denced compositions of Bolingbroke, Grattan, Erskine, 
Curran, and Robert Hall. Let him dwell upon these pas- 
sages and recite them till they almost seem his own, — 
and insensibly, without effort, he will " form to theirs 
the relish of his soul," and will find himself adopting 
their language, and imitating them instinctively through 
a natural love for the beautiful, and the strong desire 
which every one feels to reproduce what is pleasing to 
him. By this process he will have prepared in his mind, 
so to speak, a variety of oratorical moulds, of the most 
exquisite shape and pattern, into which the stream of 
thought, flowing red-hot and molten, from a mind glow- 



164 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

ing with the fire of declamation, will become fixed, as 
metal in a foundry takes the form of a noble or beauti- 
ful statue. 

Will it be said that it is the utile and not the pul- 
chrum which is the end of oratory; that it turns aside 
from its purpose when it seeks to please, instead of to 
convince and persuade; and that the metrical arrange- 
ment of words, which is one of the principal charms of 
poetry, is unfit for prose? We answer that prose has its 
music, its characteristic melody, as well as poetry, though 
of a different kind; not that of the lyre or the lute, which 
easily " weds itself to immortal verse," but a wild and 
free, an ever-pleasant, though ever-varying music, like 
that of Nature. It is a music like that of the sobbing- 
seas, or of the whispering winds and falling waters, the 
wild music which is heard by mountain streams or in the 
leafy woods of summer. The most perfect prose composi- 
tion, while it will be devoid of the complex harmony of 
verse, and of everything that may suggest the idea of 
rhyme, will yet no less than poetry have its gentle and 
equable, its impetuous and rapid flow; it will take the ear 
prisoner by its full and majestic harmonies and its abrupt 
transitions, as well as by its impressive pauses, and its 
grateful, though not regularly- recurring cadence. Now 
since all men, whether educated or uneducated, are so 
constituted as to enjoy this excellence, which, by giving 
pleasure, aids the attention, stimulates the memory, and 
facilitates the admission of argument, who does not see 
that the orator who fails to avail himself of this aid, 
neglects one of the most powerful and legitimate instru- 
ments of his art? 

The practice of storing the mind with choice passages 



THE ORATOR'S HELPS. 165 

from the best prose writers and poets, and thus flavoring 
it with the essence of good literatures, is one which is 
commanded both by the best teachers and by the example 
of some of the most celebrated orators, who have adopted 
it with signal success. Dr. King, author of " Anecdotes 
of My Own Time " (published in 1760), states that, in order 
that his pupils might acquire the art of speaking with 
correctness and facility, he used to advise them to get b}^ 
heart a page of some English classic, and the method, he 
says, was often attended with complete success. Chry- 
sostom did not begin to preach till he had enriched his 
mind with the spoils of classic learning. William Pitt, 
in his youth, read the poets, Greek, Latin and English, 
with the closest attention, and deposited in the cells of 
his memory many fine passages, which, as we have already 
seen, he afterward wove into his speeches in the happiest 
manner, and with the most telling effect. By his father's 
advice he read and re-read Barrow's sermons, to secure 
copiousness of language; and the finest parts of Shaks- 
peare he had by heart. Fox began early to steep his 
mind in classic literature, and never ceased to linger lov- 
ingly over the pages of Homer, Euripides, Virgil, and 
Ovid, till the day of his death. He was very fond of the 
Odyssey, and also of Euripides, who, among the Greek 
dramatists, seems to have been his favorite. He declares 
that of all poets this most argumentative dramatist ap- 
pears to him, " without exception, the most useful for a 
public speaker." Virgil was the Latin poet whom he 
most earnestly and fondly studied; and among the Italians, 
Ariosto, whom he preferred to Tasso, for the luxuriance of 
his imagery and the grand sweep of his imagination. 
In giving advice to others, he dwelt with peculiar em- 



166 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

phasis on this branch of reading. " I am of opinion." he 
says, " that the study of good authors, and especially of 
poets, ought never to be imtermitted by any man who is 
to speak or write for the public, or. indeed, who has any 
occasion to tax his imagination, whether it be for argu- 
ment, for illustration, for ornament, for sentiment, or for 
any other purpose." 

Burke's speeches abound with poetical gems, especially 
from Virgil and Milton. Erskine. who spoke probably the 
finest and richest English ever uttered by an advocate, 
devoted himself for two years, before his call to the bar. 
to the study of literature. He committed a large part of 
Milton to memory, and so familiarized himself with Shaks- 
peare, that it is said that he could almost, like Porson. 
have held conversations on all subjects for days together 
in the phrases of the great English dramatist. It was 
here that he acquired, not only his rich fund of ideas, 
but the fine choice of words, the vivid and varied imagery, 
that distinguished his style. Daniel Webster was a pro- 
found student of a few great poets, especially the two 
just named, and in his reply to Hayne brief passages from 
both are introduced with signal felicity and effect. Will- 
iam Pinkney owed his intellectual affluence and his pol- 
ished style to a similar cause. From his youth he made 
it a rule never to see a fine idea without committing it 
to memory. Eufus Choate says the result of this practice 
was " the most splendid and powerful English spoken 
style I ever heard." Choate himself drunk deep at the 
fountains not only of science and history, but of philosophy 
and belles-lettres. To increase his command of language. 
his copia verborum, and to avoid sinking into cheap and bald 
fluency, as well as to give elevation, energy, sonorousness 



THE orator's helps. 167 

and refinement to his vocabulary, he read aloud daily, 
during a large part of his life, a page or more from 
some fine English author. He was a profound student 
of words, and made all the realms of literature tributary 
to his vocabulary. " In literature," he used to say, " you 
find ideas. There one should daily replenish his stock. 
The whole range of polite literature should be vexed for 
thoughts." Literature, again, he contended, was neces- 
sary to get intellectual enthusiasm. " All the discipline 
and customs of social life, in our time, tend to crush emo- 
tion and feeling. Literature alone is brimful of feeling." 
Bossuet owed the kingly splendor of his style largely to 
classical studies. The great exemplars of Greece and Rome 
were always before his eyes. From the freshness and pic- 
turesqueness of Homer, the indignant brevity of Tacitus, and 
the serried strength of Thucydides, he drew that vigor of 
style, which, when enriched by the sublime imagery of the 
Prophets and the tender pathos of the Evangelists, placed 
him among the first of Christian orators. The " Iliad " and 
"Odyssey " he had thumbed till he knew them nearly all by 
heart. His passion for Homer, whom he always called " di- 
vine," was so great, that he recited his verses in his sleep. 
It was, however, to the Old Testament, chiefly, — to Isaiah, 
with his unsurpassed sublimity, — to Jeremiah, with his in- 
tense pathos, — to Ezekiel, with his gorgeous coloring, — to 
Daniel, and the other lyrical poets of the Bible, who have 
never been surpassed as singers, or as interpreters of the 
human heart and prophets of the conscience, — that he was 
chiefly indebted for his inspiration. Fisher Ames was also 
a profound student of the Scriptures, especially the Old 
Testament, with whose ideas and images his mind was 
deeply imbued, — an example which cannot be too earnestly 



168 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

commended to every public speaker, since the Bible, being 
at once the most human and the most divine of books, is 
better fitted than an}^ other to move the common heart of 
humanity. One of the greatest oratorical successes of 
Richard Lalor Sheil was achieved at a great popular meet- 
ing, by taking the first chapter of Exodus for his theme, 
and quoting, with the Bible in his hand, " with a solemnity 
and effect electrical on the sympathies of a religious and 
enthusiastic people, £he words of the inspired writer, and 
founding on them an impassioned appeal to his countrymen 
to persevere in their career, — to press onward to the goal 
appointed for them, heedless of the fears of the timid or 
the suggestions of the compromising/' 

Along with the reading of the best and most idiomatic 
English authors, the practice of translation will also be 
found invaluable to the young orator. It is one of the best 
keys with which to unlock the treasures of his own tongue. 
In hunting for fit words for foreign idioms, and felicities of 
expression to match the felicities of the original, he will be 
at the same time enriching his vocabulary and taking a 
lesson in extempore speech. In one respect this practice is 
preferable to original composition, for it gives a clew to 
niceties and elegancies of diction which the translator 
would neither be iikely to hit upon himself, nor to find in 
any English writer, and at the same time it saves him from 
the servility of being a copyist. He has a model before 
him, of which he is to catch and reproduce the life and 
spirit, instead of making a cold and mechanical copy: he 
paints a similar picture, but with different pigments; and 
thus his pride of originality is gratified, while he is not 
compelled to rely on his own narrow resources. 

We are aware that there is a growing distaste to-day, 



169 

especially in the West, for the study of the dead languages ; 
but we are persuaded by much experience and observation, 
that the study is worth all the time and toil it costs, simply 
on account of the command it gives of language. Who can 
estimate the facility of expression, to say nothing of the in- 
tellectual discipline and the acquisition of new ideas, which 
must accrue from this constant wrestling with the thoughts 
of the great writers of antiquity in order to understand 
and translate them? Could any better or more ingenious 
contrivance be devised to form an artist in words, — to give 
one a command of " thought's indispensable tool," lan- 
guage, — than this perpetual comparison of the terms and 
idioms of two tongues, to discover those that are equivalent; 
this incessant weighing and measuring of phrases, to find 
which will give the exact shade, or, at least, the nearest ap- 
proach to the divine beauty, of the original? Above all, 
what aptitude for extempore speech must result from this 
practice, pursued for years, in the decomposition and re- 
composition of sentences, — of combining and recombining 
their separate words in all possible ways, so as to hit upon 
the arrangement which will at once convey the thought 
most perfectly, and at the same time give the most ex- 
quisite delight to the ear, — and, again, of balancing one 
sentence against another, in order, by a proper mixture of 
long ones with short, periodic with loose, to give to the 
whole that unity, measure and harmony, which will not 
only render it luminous with meaning, but make it sink 
deeply and linger long in the mind? 

There is no doubt that some of the most eloquent 

speakers of ancient and modern times have acquired 

their magical command of words in this way. Cicero 

thus stocked his vocabulary from the Greek. Lord Ches- 

8 



170 ORATORY A]S T D ORATORS. 

terfield, one of the most elegant and polished talkers and 
orators of Europe, translated much both from English 
into French and from French into English. Owing in 
part to this practice, a certain elegance of style became 
habitual to him, and it would have given him more trou- 
ble, he says, to express himself inelegantly than he had 
ever taken to avoid this defect. Chatham turned and re- 
turned the pages of Demosthenes into English. William 
Pitt, his son, translated for years aloud to himself and 
to his tutor. Following Horace's rule: 

" Nee verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus 
Interpres, 1 ' 

he read a pretty long passage in the original, and then 
turned it at once into regular English sentences, aiming 
to give the ideas with great exactness, and, at the same 
time, to express himself with idiomatic accuracy and ease, 
and pausing, when he was at a loss, for the fitting word, 
until it came. Of course, he had often to stop, at first; 
but by degrees he acquired a greater mastery and readi- 
ness; and in after life he always ascribed to this jDractice 
his extraordinary command of language, which enabled 
him to give every idea its most felicitous expression, and 
to pour out an unbroken stream of thought, hour after 
hour, without once hesitating for a word, or recalling a 
phrase, or sinking for a moment into looseness or inac- 
curacy in the structure of his sentences.* ■ Lord Mans- 
field, who in his youth had been an enthusiast in classic 
study, and in whose brain, according to Cowper. 

* " Memory, like the bee that's fed 

From Flora's balmy store, 
The quintessence of all he read 
Had treasured up before, 1 ' 

* Goodrich's ''British Eloquence.'" 552. 



THE ORATOR'S HELPS. 171 

turned every one of Cicero's orations into English a sec- 
ond time. 

Lord Brougham was an enthusiastic advocate of trans- 
lation, and also of classic imitation as a help to the ora- 
tor. In a letter addressed in 1823, at the mature age of 
forty- four, to Macaulay's father, he says: "I know from 
experience that nothing is half so successful in these 
times (bad though they be) as what has been formed on 
the Greek models. I use a very poor instance in giving 
my own experience; but I do assure you that both in 
courts of law and Parliament, and even to mobs, I have 
never made so much play (to use a very modern phrase) 
as when I was almost translating from the Greek. I com- 
posed the peroration of my speech for the queen, in the 
House of Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes 
for three or four weeks, and I composed it twenty times 
over at least, and it certainly succeeded in a very extra- 
ordinary degree, and far above any merits of its own." 
Rufus Choate, too, was a tireless translator. The culture 
of expression, he held, should be a specific study, distinct 
from the invention of thought. Translation should be 
practiced for the double object of keeping fresh in the 
recollection the words already acquired, and to tax and 
torment invention and discovery for additional rich and 
expressive terms. Like Keats and Gautier, he loved words 
for themselves, — for their look, their aroma, their color, 
— and was always on the look-out for the choicest and 
most picturesque phrases. Tacitus was his chosen author, 
and, in the busiest days of his ever busy life, he would 
always give five minutes, if no more, to his task. One of 
his chief objects was to stock his memory with synonyms. 
For every word he translated he would rack his brain 



172 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

and search his books till he had found five or six corre- 
sponding English words. He aimed also to enrich his 
vocabulary with suggestive words, — those that have a 
spell in them for the memory and imagination. He knew 
that sometimes even one such word, fitly spoken, has been 
sufficient to wither an antagonist, or to electrify an au- 
dience. " You don't want," said he to a student, " a 
diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the 
air, common and unsuggestive ; but you want one whose 
every word is full freighted with suggestion and associ- 
ation, with beauty and power. 1 ' Like William Pinkney, he 
regarded the study of dictionaries as a great fertilizer of 
language, and spent many hours in conning their pages. 

It is hardly necessary to say that one of the best helps 
to the acquisition of skill in oratory is a profound study of 
the best specimens of eloquence. As the young painter or 
sculptor is not content with text-books and lectures, but 
spends months or years in the galleries of Florence, Rome, 
and a score of other places, in order to learn how the great 
masters of form and color wrought their miracles, so the 
oratorical student should dissect and analyze the great mas- 
terpieces of eloquence, and endeavor, so far as possible, to 
"pluck out the heart of their mystery," — to learn the 
secret of their charm. Let him not confine himself to read- 
ing fine passages, such as are to be found in "Academical 
Speakers " and treatises on elocution, for the exclusive 
reading of these would be misleading, and, on the whole, 
more injurious than helpful. A speech of the highest 
order will always contain some of those electric and stimu- 
lating qualities which we look for in books of specimens; 
but the striking metaphor, the startling appeal, the biting 
sarcasm, the bold invective, the daring apostrophe, which 



THE orator's helps. 173 

characterize these selected passages, form but an insignifi- 
cant portion of a long discourse, and sometimes they are 
wanting altogether to speeches which are models of lumi- 
nous statement or of powerful and logical reasoning. 

The true orator does not strive to be brilliant; he 
seeks only to convince and persuade, — to secure a client's 
acquittal, to show the unsoundness of an adversary's 
principles or reasoning, or to obtain a vote for a certain 
measure. It has been justly said that it was not with 
the decorated hilt of his sword that the old knight cleaved 
in twain the skull of his enemy; nor was it the shining 
plume on his helmet that protected his own head. Often 
the pith and marrow of a speech lie in no part which a 
school-boy would choose for declamation, but in the ex- 
quisite arrangement of its arguments, in the masterly 
clearness of its statements, in the accrescent energy of 
its appeals. It was said of Lord Mansfield, who divided 
the honors of oratory in the House of Lords with Chat- 
ham, that he was " eloquent by his wisdom." He affected 
no sallies of imagination, or bursts of passion; but se- 
cured attention and assent to all he said by his constant 
good sense, flowing in apt terms and in the clearest method. 
He excelled, above all, in the statement of a case, arrang- 
ing the facts in an order so lucid, and with so nice a 
reference to the conclusions to be founded on them, that 
the hearer felt inclined to be convinced before he was in 
possession of the arguments. A writer who often heard 
George Wood, the leader of the New York Bar some 
thirty years ago, says that his speech was as plain as 
that of a Quaker. The thought was as free from the 
refraction of words as is the light of a planet seen 
through one of Clark's object-glasses. 



174 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Count Montalembert, one of the most brilliant French 
orators of the present century, was a profound student 
of British eloquence. He knew almost by heart the prin- 
cipal speeches of the great orators of England and Ire- 
land, and in his youth was wont to relate with impas- 
sioned ardor the Parliamentary debates to his schoolmates. 
The fiery Grattan and the splendid contest which he 
maintained against the Parliamentary union of England 
and Ireland, held a conspicuous place in his glowing pic- 
tures. But above all, Burke was the hero of his idolatry, 
and the portrait of the great Irishman hung in the 
Count's study till the last day of his life. The speeches 
against the American War and Warren Hastings, — and 
even those in which Burke vehemently denounced the 
French Revolution, were all analyzed or repeated by Mon- 
talembert to an admiring and electrified audience. 

Again, besides studying the masterpieces of eloquence 
in print, the oratorical aspirant should listen to the best 
living speakers. As the young bird, that is learning to 
fly, watches its parents, and with its eyes fixed on them, 
spreads its unsteady wings, follows in their path, and 
copies their motions, so the young man who would master 
the art of oratory, should watch closely the veteran prac- 
titioners of the art, and assiduously note and imitate their 
best methods, till, gaining confidence in the strength of his 
pinions, he may venture to cease circling about his nest, 
and boldly essay the eagle flights of eloquence. It was 
thus, in part, that Grattan's oratorical genius was trained 
and directed. Going in his youth to London, he was 
attracted to the debates in Parliament by the eloquence 
of Lord Chatham, which acted with such a spell upon his 
mind as henceforth to fix his destiny. To emulate the 



THE orator's helps. 175 

fervid and electric oratory of that great leader, repro- 
ducing his lofty conceptions in new and original forms, — 
for he was no servile copyist, — was henceforth the object 
of his greatest efforts and of his most fervent aspirations. 
The genius of Rufus Choate, original and distinctive as 
it unquestionably was, was fired in a great degree by 
listening, when he was a law-student at Washington, to 
the fervid eloquence of William Pinkney, whom he not 
a little resembled. 

Among all the helps of the orator, there is no auxiliary 
which he may employ with greater advantage than the 
pen. Cicero calls it optimus et praestantissimus dicendi 
effector ac magister. He says that in writing on a sub- 
ject we give more than usual attention to it, and thus 
many things are suggested to us of which we should 
otherwise never have thought. We choose the best words, 
and arrange them in the best order, and a habit is thus 
formed of employing always the best language; so that 
as a boat, when the rowers rest upon their oars, will 
continue to move by the impulse previously given, so a 
speaker who has been accustomed to use his pen, will, 
when he is obliged to utter anything extempore, be apt 
to do it with the same grace and finish as if it had been 
previously composed. There can be no doubt that the 
frequent use of the pen helps to give not only clearness 
and precision, but force and vividness, to the speaker's 
thought. It is not enough that the speaker's theme has 
been profoundly meditated and digested; besides the cogi- 
tatio et commentatio upon which Cicero insists, there should 
be the assidua ac diligens scriptura. In this way, and in 
this way only, can the speaker acquire and perpetuate that 
command and general accuracy of language, — that copious- 



176 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

ness in the diction, precision in the selection of terms, and 
close articulation in the construction, — which alone can 
insure the highest excellence. By this means he will not 
only make luminous ideas which, when shut up in the 
mind, are apt to preserve a certain haziness, but he will 
open richer veins of thought, and, above all, will be able 
to lay up in his memory a supply of weapons ready for any 
emergency. Important sentences and passages thus care- 
fully wrought out beforehand in the laboratory of thought, 
can hardly fail, even if not delivered exactly verbatim, of 
being more effective ordinarily than those which are 
thrown off hastily in the hurry of debate, when there is no 
time to grope about for the most apt and telling words, 
and the expression must be effected at the first stroke. 

In thus commending the use of the pen, we would not 
counsel a speaker, except in the case of a eulogy or other 
formal address, to write out the whole of a speech, and 
" learn it by heart," even to every little beggarly parti- 
cle. No doubt there have been orators who have done 
this with considerable success. Edward Everett adopted 
this method; but though years of practice and an unfail- 
ing memory enabled him to give many passages of what 
he had thus "conned and learned by rote," in the free, 
off-hand manner of impromptu address, yet there was al- 
ways visible, even in his happiest efforts, a certain air of 
constraint and artificiality. It was rarely that the most 
impassioned burst of oratory was delivered with such a 
perfection of concealed art, as not to excite a suspicion 
in the hearer's mind, that, like Sheridan's cut and dry 
exclamation of "Good God! Mr. Speaker," it had not 
been carefully studied before-hand. But if this master of 
memorized speech did not succeed in cheating his hearers, 



THE okatok's helps. 177 

still more signal has been the failure of his disciples, 
most of whom have succeeded only in reproducing his 
frigidity and monotonous elegance, without being able to 
impart to their recitations the air of sudden suggestion 
which he was occasionally so fortunate as to command. 
Tacitus says, as truly as tersely, that magna eloquentia, 
sicut flamma, materia alitur, et motibus excitatur, et urendo 
clarescit, — which William Pitt translated: "It is with 
eloquence as with a flame. It requires fuel to feed it, 
motion to excite it, and it brightens as it burns." The 
practice of memoriter speaking has, unquestionably, some 
advantages, and the fact that it was the favorite method 
of the ancient orators goes far to commend it. If the 
speaker has a tenacious memory, and can commit a speech 
rapidly, he is relieved of all anxiety about his thought 
and style, and is left free to throw all his force into the 
proper work of delivery. Having the whole speech in 
his mind, he knows the relations of the several parts to 
each other, and is thus " able to graduate the degrees of 
force, pitch, and rapidity of movement appropriately to 
every part; to return to the key-note and initial movement 
as often as he may be required, and to manage his pauses 
and transitions so as to produce their true and proper 
effect." On the other hand, speaking from memory, in 
most cases, not only involves a great amount of disagree- 
able drudgery, and almost necessitates a break-down when, 
from interruption or sudden nervousness, a passage which 
forms a necessary link in the chain is forgotten, but it 
prevents the speaker from feeling the pulse of his audi- 
ence, catching inspiration from their looks or applause, 
meeting objections with which he is interrupted, and vary- 
ing his address with the varying exigences of the hour. 



178 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

But while speeches should not, except in rare cases, 
be written out and memorized entire, yet important pas- 
sages, we think, should be; and, in every case where one 
is to speak on an important occasion, he should make 
himself so completely master of his theme by patient 
thought and frequent use of the pen, that the substance 
and the method, the matter and the order, of his ideas 
shall be perfectly familiar to him. Nor is it enough 
that he possess himself of sharply defined thoughts, and 
the precise order of their delivery; he must brood over 
them hour by hour till ; ' the fire burns " and the mind 
glows with them, — till not only the arguments and illus- 
trations have been supplied to the memory, but the most 
felicitous terms, the most vivid, pregnant, and salient 
phrases, have been suggested, which he will recall, to an 
extent that will surprise him, by the matter in which 
they are imbedded, and with which they are connected by 
the laws of association. Proceeding in this wslj, he will 
unite, in a great measure, the advantages of the written 
and the spoken styles. Avoiding the miserable bondage 
of the speaker who servilely adheres to manuscript, — a 
procedure which produces, where the effort of memory 
has not been perfect, a feeling of constraint and frigidity 
in the delivery, and, where it has been perfect, an ap- 
pearance of artificiality in the composition, — he will weave 
into his discourse the passages which he has polished to 
the last degree of art, and he will introduce also anything 
that occurs during the inspiration of delivery. He will 
have all the electrical power, the freshness, fire, and fervor 
of the orator who does not write, and at the same time 
much of the condensation, elegance, and exquisite finish of 
him who coins his phrases in the deliberation of his study. 



THE orator's helps. 179 

There is no doubt that, in point of fact, almost 
every great orator writes passages which he commits to 
memory. Sheridan prepared his impromptus beforehand 
to an extent which seems incredible to one not familiar 
with his habits. Indeed, one of the chief defects of his 
speeches was the lack of callida junctura, — the transitions 
from his carefully-conned declamation to his extempore 
statements being perceptible to everybody. As he was 
unable to keep for an instant on the wing, there was no 
gradation, and he suddenly dropped from tropes and rhet- 
oric into a style that was strangely bald and lax. One 
of the secrets of Canning's elegance and polish of style 
was his constant practice of writing in conjunction with 
extemporaneous speech. On every important debate " he 
wrote much beforehand, and composed more in his mind, 
which flowed forth spontaneously, and mingled with the 
current of his thoughts, in all the fervor of the most 
prolonged and excited discussion. Hence while he had 
great ease and variety, he never fell into that negligence 
and looseness of style which we always find in a purely 
extemporaneous speaker." Many of Curran's winged pas- 
sages, which seem born of the inspiration of the moment, 
were elaborated in the closet. Like Canning, he dove- 
tailed them so skillfully with the others as to make them 
appear impromptu. " My dear fellow," said he to Phil- 
lips, " the day of inspiration has gone by. Everything I 
ever said, which was worth remembering, — my de bene 
esses, my white horses, as I call them, — were all care- 
fully prepared." Some of the most electric passages of 
Brougham's speeches were written and rewritten again 
and again. Indeed, he expressly declares that the perfec- 
tion of public speaking consists in introducing a prepared 



180 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

passage with effect. " It is worthy of note," he says, " for 
the use of the student in rhetoric, that Erskine wrote down 
word for word the passage about the savage and his bundle 
of sticks. His mind having acquired a certain excitement 
and elevation, and received an impetus from the tone and 
quality of the matured and premeditated composition, re- 
tained that impetus after the impelling cause had died 
away." 

The practice of Plunket, so far as it went, was admira- 
ble; he used, it is said, to prepare a few keen, epigram- 
matic, or passionate sentences, in which to concentrate the 
effect of extemporaneous passages that led up to them. 
Sheil, who spoke always with an air of passion and aban- 
donment, which nothing, apparently, but the enthusiasm 
of the moment could inspire, elaborated the great pas- 
sages of his speeches with the utmost nicety and finish. 
They were hewn, chiselled, and polished with all the ten- 
der care of a sculptor, rehearsed with all their possible 
effects, and kept in reserve till the critical moment when, 
by contrast with other parts, they would shine forth most 
resplendently. Montalembert polished and repolished some 
parts of his orations, which seemed impromptu, with cease- 
less care.* Bossuet, on the other hand, disliked writing, 
which only distracted him. He dashed down rapidly on 
paper, texts, citations, and arguments suitable to the theme 
and the occasion; meditated deeply on this rough docu- 
ment, in the morning of the day he was to preach; and 
thus developing his discourse in his mind, he passed men- 

* Sainte-Beuve, speaking of his combination of the written with the impro- 
vised parts of his speeches, says: " Le tout est enveloppe dans une sorte de cir- 
culation vive qui ne laisse apercevoir aucun intervalle, et qui fait que les jets du 
moment, les pensees medite'es ou note's, les morceaux tout faits, se rejoignent, 
s'enchainent avec souplesse, et se meuvent comme les membres d'un meme 
corps." 



181 



tally through his sermon two or three times, reading the 
paper before him, and altering and improving, as though 
the whole had been written. A famous temperance lec- 
turer used to say of his practice that the main body of his 
addresses was in the language of the moment, but that 
" special howls " were carefully prepared. 

Macaulay is said to have declared that he dared not 
write a speech that he was to deliver, on account of the 
danger of falling into the style of an essay, which he 
deemed altogether unfit for a public speech. It is notori- 
ous, however, that in his parliamentary efforts he gener- 
ally "talked like a book"; and, indeed, some of his speeches 
are but reproductions of his masterly essays. His speech 
in 1830, on The Civil Disabilities of the Jews, is the le- 
gitimate offspring of the Essay of 1829. That in early 
life he sometimes wrote and conned his eloquent periods 
is evident from the following incident related in an Eng- 
lish work published about twenty years ago: At the an- 
nual anti-slavery meeting in 1826, Mr. Macaulay delivered 
the first of the brilliant orations which gave him fame 
as a public speaker. At its close a gentleman asked him 
to furnish a report of it for the London " Morning Chroni- 
cle," saying that he spoke so rapidly, and the excellence 
of the speech depended so much on the collocation of the 
words, that only its author could do it justice in a re- 
port. At first, Mr. Macaulay hesitated; but, on being 
pressed, said that he would think of it. On going to 
the office of the " Chronicle " in the evening, the writer 
found, he says, a large packet containing a verbatim re- 
port of the speech as spoken. The brilliant passages were 
marked in pencil, and the whole manuscript had been 
evidently well thumbed over, — showing that no school- 



182 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

boy had ever more laboriously and faithfully committed to 
memory his speech in " Enfield's Speaker, 1 ' than had the 
great historian of the age " learned by heart " his first 
public oration. As he advanced in years, this habit grew 
upon him so strongly, that at last it was a positive 
pain and embarrassment to him to be called upon to 
speak even a dozen sentences off-hand. Long and careful 
preparation was essential to him; and, even with prep- 
aration, he was nervous, anxious, uneasy, until he had 
poured out his cogitations. " On the nights, too, on which 
he intended to speak, a child might have discerned the 
fact. He sat with his arms crossed; his head was fre- 
quently thrown back, as if he were attentively surveying 
the roof; and though the Speaker of the House of Com- 
mons was a perfectly impartial man, and filled his office 
to the satisfaction of every member, one could scarcely 
doubt that he often relieved a poet and an orator from 
his uneasiness by naming Mr. Macaulay at an early period 
of the evening." 

We have heard from the lips of the late Judge Story 
a similar and more striking anecdote of the celebrated 
American advocate, William Pinkney.* Though a con- 
summate master of the arts of extempore speaking, he 
often wrote out the principal parts of his speeches, in 
order to preserve a correct and polished diction. He be- 
lieved, with the great orators of antiquity, that this prac- 
tice is absolutely necessary, if one would acquire and 
preserve a style at once correct and graceful in public 
speaking, which otherwise is apt to degenerate into col- 
loquial negligence and tedious verbosity. Alexander Ham- 
ilton, in a great libel cause which he argued, wrote out 

* See the author's " Hours with Men and Books, 1 ' pp. 105-7, for this anecdote. 



THE orator's helps. 183 

his argument the night before, and then tore it up. "Al- 
ways prepare, investigate, compose a speech," said Rufus 
Choate to a student, "pen in hand. Webster always 
wrote when he could get a chance. 11 The reasons which 
Mr. Choate assigned for this practice, were that only in 
this way can a speaker be sure that he had got to the 
bottom of his subject, or have the confidence and ease 
flowing from the certainty that he cannot break down. 
The written matter, he added, " must be well memorized. 11 
He himself acted on this rule. In the court-room he 
always spoke before a pile of manuscript, covered with 
his cabalistic " pot-hooks, 11 to which, however, he only oc- 
casionally referred.* The night before addressing a jury, 
he would sometimes write all night. It is hardly neces- 
sary to say that in all cases where carefully finished 
passages are introduced into an extempore speech, it is a 
part of the speaker's art, and one that requires the nicest 
skill, to blend the impromptu and the prepared parts in- 
to an indistinguishable whole. Any clumsiness that be- 
trays the joints, — that reveals the secret of the "purple 
patches, 11 — will destroy the charm. An English writer 
advises the speaker, who would conceal his art in such 

*In his journal, May, 1843, Mr. Choate wrote: "I am not to forget that I 
am, and must he, if I would live, a student of forensic rhetoric. ... A wide 
and anxious survey of that art and that science teaches me that careful, con- 
stant writing is the parent of ripe speech. It has no other. But that writing 
must always he rhetorical writing, that is, such as might in some parts of 
some speech be uttered to a listening audience. It is to be composed as in 
and for the presence of an audience. So it is to be intelligible, perspicuous, 
pointed, terse, with image, epithet, turn, advancing and impulsive, full of 
generalizations, maxims, illustrating the sayings of the wise. 11 In every part 
of study. Mr. Choate relied greatly on the pen, which he regarded as the cor- 
rector of vagueness of thought and expression. "In translating, 11 says Mr. 
E. G. Parker, in his "Reminiscences, 11 "in mastering a difficult book, in pre- 
paring his arguments, in collecting his evidence, he was always armed with that, 
to him, potent weapon. 11 



184 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

cases, to connect the elaborated part of his speech with 
what has incidentally fallen in debate; "when you come 
to that premeditated and finest part, hesitate and appear 
to boggle; catch at some expression that shall fall short 
of your idea, and then seem to hit at last upon the true 
thing. This has always an extraordinary effect, and gives 
the air of extempore genius to what you say."* Lord 
Brougham appears to have acted, at times, with imper- 
fect success, on a hint like this. " When he seemed to 
pause in search of thoughts or words, 1 ' says Lord Gran- 
ville, " we knew that he had a sentence ready cut and 
dried. 1 ' 

It may be objected, — indeed, it often has been objected 
to speeches thus carefully prepared, — that they are too 
elaborate; that they are likely to lack naturalness and 
simplicity; that, in short, they smell of the midnight 
oil. If such, in any case, is the effect of preparation, — 
if the orator, in the effort to perfect his speech, is tempted 
to aim merely at tickling the ear, and he thus, by intro- 
ducing beauties of thought or expression which have no 
relation to the subject, and no tendency to facilitate its 
comprehension, draws attention not to his theme but to 
himself or his rhetorical skill, — the objection is, indeed, 
fatal. The best style, written or spoken, is not like a 
painted window which transmits the light of day tinged 
with a hundred hues, and diverts the attention from its 
proper use to the pomp and splendor of the artist's doing; 
it is a transparent, colorless medium, which simply lets 
the thought be seen, without suggesting a thought about 
the medium itself. But if the elaboration, however great, 

* ''Parliamentary Logic," by the Right Hon. William Gerard Hamilton, 
London, 1798. 



THE orator's helps. 185 

be for legitimate ends, — if the energy and harmony, the 
vivid images, the " apt words in apt places," which result 
from it, aid attention, and facilitate the admission of argu- 
ment, at the same time that they delight the hearer, the 
delight being aimed at only for an ulterior and higher 
purpose, — then it is hardly possible for the speaker to 
take too much pains. The utmost elaboration of this 
kind is not only pardonable but praiseworthy. Natural- 
ness and simplicity, the last and most excellent graces 
which can belong to a speaker, so far from being opposed 
to it, can be attained in no other way. The utmost art, 
— art in the sense of a deliberate effort to adapt the 
means to the ends, and to do what is to be done in the 
most perfect manner, — is here the truest nature.* 

If the Prince of Orators, instead of trusting to im- 
promptu inspiration, was indefatigable in his efforts to 
prepare himself for his public discourses, shall a modern 
speaker, of inferior powers, be forbidden to do so? That 
Demosthenes could speak extemporaneously, is well known; 
but it is equally well known that he never did so when 
he could help it; and so diligent was his preparation, that 
the very objection we are considering was urged by his 
enemies against his oratory, — that it smelt of the lamp. 
Regarding oratory as an art, and as an art in which pro- 
ficiency can come only by intense labor, he left nothing to 
chance which he could secure by forethought and skill, — 
nothing to the inspiration of the moment, which deliberate 
industry could make certain. He knew, doubtless, what 
every great speaker, — what every writer, indeed, — knows 
perfectly well, that even the so-called flashes of inspiration 

* " They came to him too naturally not to have been studied." says George 
Sand of the vehement words of one of her heroes. 
8* 



186 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

are the reward, not of the indolent man, but of him who 
is usually most laborious in his preparation. It is after 
such preparation, due rest having meanwhile been taken, 
that, as it has been happily said, the most unlooked-for 
felicities, the happiest thoughts and expressions, often sud- 
denly flash into unbidden existence under the glow of 
speaking, — felicities of which, while in the act of prepara- 
tion, the mind may never have caught a glimpse. But 
then this happy excitement, this exaltation of all the facul- 
ties, is only possible to the mind when prolonged prepara- 
tion has suggested all the trains of thought likely to 
stimulate emotion, and has already in part stimulated it; 
and, above all, has insured that self-possession in the 
treatment of the subject without which the boasted " in- 
spiration " never visits, or is likely to visit, the most elo- 
quent speaker. " It is preparation which piles the wood, 
and lays the sacrifice, and then the celestial fire may 
perchance descend. The entire water in the vessel must 
have its whole temperature slowly raised to the boiling- 
point; and then, and not till then, it ' flashes into steam.' " 
The habit of careful and laborious preparation will no 
more rob the orator of his fervor than faithful drilling 
robs the soldier of his fire. It is not the raw volunteer, 
but the soldier who has practiced the exercises of the 
parade-ground, that will do best in the fight; and we may 
add, too, that the sentences which have been carefully knit 
together in the closet will often transmit the glow of pas- 
sion as the solid and well-trained phalanx burns with 
martial fire, and hurls itself like a thunderbolt upon the 
enemy. 

The question has been asked: Why is it that men who 
have ranked high as writers, have so often miserably 



THE orator's helps. 187 

failed as speakers? Why is it that they who may be said 
on paper to roar you in the ears of the groundlings an 
'twere any lion, aggravate their voice on the platform 
like a sucking dove? Examples of this are so numerous 
that they will suggest themselves to every reader. Addi- 
son and Gibbon attempted oratory in the British Senate 
only to " fall flat and shame their worshippers." The 
latter tells us that the bad speakers filled him with ap- 
prehension, the good ones with despair. Sir Philip Francis, 
who was so ready and powerful with the pen, was hesi- 
tating and unready in speech. Pope was tongue-tied in 
a large company, and Irving was dumb at dinners given 
in his honor. When Beranger was elected to the Na- 
tional Assembly of France, he sat one day under protest, 
and refused to go again. With the grace of La Fontaine and 
the philosophic wit of Voltaire, he was as shy as Dominie 
Sampson, and declared in a letter to the press from his 
garret, that to address more than six persons was beyond 
his power. Cicero was an exception to the rule, and so 
in modern times have been a few men in England and 
France; but the instances are too few to invalidate it. 
" Sir James Mackintosh," says Macaulay, " spoke essays, 
Mr. Fox wrote debates; his history reads like a powerful 
reply thundered from the front Opposition-bench at three 
in the morning." This statement gives, we think, even 
too favorable an impression of Mr. Fox's abilities as a 
writer. So far is he from writing with power, that all 
the fire of his genius seems to be extinguished when he 
takes up his pen, and we can with difficulty believe that 
the fervid orator who delivered the speech on the West- 
minster Scrutiny is the same man who wrote the History 
of the Reign of James II. 



188 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Bolingbroke both wrote and spoke well; but graceful 
and flowing as is his written style, it is not free from 
the faults which we are apt to find in the compositions 
of one who declaims on paper. Always vivid and ani- 
mated, it sometimes tires the reader with repetitions and 
amplifications to which, when set off by his fine person 
and pleasing intonations, an audience might listen with 
profit and delight. Brougham was one of the giants of 
the senate; but he wrote as if he were speaking from the 
woolsack, and his big words and labyrinthine sentences 
violated the first laws of literary composition. Dr. John- 
son wanted to try his hand in the House of Commons; 
but though he declared public speaking to be a mere 
knack, it is possible that the very qualities which made 
him the monarch of the club-room, and gave him such 
power with the pen. would have prevented his success as 
an orator. A succession of vivid, pointed, epigrammatic sen- 
tences, which have a telling effect in the pauses or quick 
turns of conversation, do not make a speech. Home 
Tooke failed in the House of Commons, in spite of his 
tact, talent, self-possession, and long practice at the hust- 
ings. Even Mr. Gladstone is no exception to the rule. 
" Too subtle a thinker and too conscientious a mind to 
attain the highest kind of oratory, the object of which is 
to persuade by carrying, as it were by storm, the feelings 
and the passions of the audience, he is yet clear, pointed, 
and vigorous in debate; but, on the other hand, no one 
can deny that he is an obscure and intricate writer. 
He seems graceful as a swan on the waters of parlia- 
mentary strife; but when he takes up his pen, he is like 
the same when it leaves its native element and waddles 
awkwardly on the ground." 



THE orator's helps. 189 

The explanation of this phenomenon is not difficult. 
A moment's reflection will show us that the eloquentia 
umbratica, at which the writer aims, is an elaborate form 
of beauty which is unsuited to the strife of business, and 
the tumult of a public assembly. The language and style 
which are most impressive in the drawing-room, are ut- 
terly ineffective upon the platform. The fine tooling and 
delicate tracery of the cabinet artist are lost upon a build- 
ing of colossal proportions. It is plain, therefore, that 
very different, even quite opposite, intellectual gifts are 
required to form a good writer and a good speaker. 
Abstraction of mind, seclusion from the din and tumult 
of public assemblies, unwearied patience in gathering the 
materials of composition, and exquisite taste, that will be 
satisfied only with the utmost nicety and finish of style, 
are demanded by the writer; while quickness of thought, 
boundless self-confidence, tact in seizing upon the most 
available, though not the most satisfactory, arguments, 
and a certain intellectual coarseness that is not offended 
by a slip or a blunder, are necessary to the orator. Again, 
a writer may spend an hour in choosing a word, and a 
day in polishing a sentence; he may watch for a simile 
" as the idle boy watches for the lurking place of the 
adder " ; but, as the author of Lacon has observed, elo- 
quence, to produce its full effect, must start from the 
head of the orator, as Pallas from the brain of Jove, 
clad in full panoply. The fastidious writer may blot out 
words and substitute new ones by the hundred, and it is 
his own fault if the fact is known to his dearest friend; 
but if an orator chances to boggle once with his tongue, 
the detection is immediate, and the punishment certain. 
Great writers, too, having a reputation to support, often 



190 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

suffer as speakers from a self-defeating over-anxiety to 
do well; like Sheridan, who was said to have been all 
his life afraid of the author of " The School for Scandal," 
they are frightened at the shadow of their own reputation. 

Among the youthful orator's helps, there is no doubt 
that conversation may be made one of the most serviceable. 
Of course, there is a material difference between public 
speaking and private; yet the fact that one is monologue, 
and the other dialogue, does not prevent the latter from 
being a material aid toward the acquisition of ease and 
self-possession in public speech, especially in debate. 
Quickness of thought, skill in seizing upon the strong 
points of a subject, exactness of statement, adroitness in 
parry and thrust, facility of expression, and general men- 
tal activity, are all cultivated by conversation, and are at 
the same time the qualities most needed in public dis- 
cussion. Instead of talking to five or ten persons in a 
public address, you are talking to hundreds or thou- 
sands, but " the one exercise has helped for the other, as 
singing in a parlor helps to sing in a choir, or as shoot- 
ing with an air-gun, at ten paces, helps one to shoot 
straight with a rifle, at a hundred." 

We cannot conclude this chapter without reminding 
the student of oratory that there is no calling in which 
faith in one's self, so necessary to all successful exertion, 
is more necessary than in that of the orator. After he 
has made all possible preparation for a public effort, he 
should, as far as possible, dismiss all anxiety about the 
result. If, instead of having this self-confidence, he dis- 
trusts his own powers, and becomes self-critical, acting 
continually as a spy upon himself, he will almost cer- 
tainly be embarrassed and crippled in his speech, if he 



THE ORATOR'S HELPS. 191 

does not break down altogether. Suspicion here, as else- 
where, tends to beget the very evil that is deprecated. The 
mind is apt to avenge any distrust of its faithfulness. 
Time, practice, and patience only can give the perfect 
ease, coolness, and self-possession which are essential to 
perfect success, — that profound faith in one's abilities 
which acts as a charm upon all the powers of the mind, 
— as time only can bestow that practical instinct of 
skill which gives the intuitive law of success, and shows 
the only way to reach it. And here we may speak of 
a phenomenon noted by some speakers which is full of 
encouragement to tyros in oratory who are appalled by 
the Herculean labors and the difficulties which " cast 
their shadows before " them, as they toil up the steeps of 
excellence. We allude to that law of the mind by which its 
muscles, like those of the body, becomes autonomic, a law 
unto themselves; by which, as an eloquent pulpit orator 
has said, " the intuition with which it works is a safer 
and surer guide than precepts, and better and surer suc- 
cess is reached than the most laborious planning could 
have gained." Everybody who has read the physiological 
works of the day, is more or less familiar with what is 
called "unconscious cerebration," a state in which the 
brain works unconsciously,— solving problems or answer- 
ing questions at night, while the man is sleeping, which 
baffled all his powers in the daytime. Phenomena like 
this occur in the experience of accomplished and trained 
speakers. 

A writer in " Harper's Magazine " speaks of a preacher 
unsurpassed by any living one in extempore power, alike 
of language, thought, and tone, who affirms that, some- 
times, in his best hours, he loses all conscious hold upon 



192 ORATORY AtfD ORATORS. 

his mind and speech, and while perfectly sure that all is 
going on well in his attic, it seems to him that somebody 
else is talking up there; and he catches himself wonder- 
ing who under the sun that fellow is who is driving on 
at such a rate. Examples of this unconscious action of 
the mind are seen in every calling. It is this instinct of 
skill, the result of years of practice, self-discipline, and 
observation, which enables the funambulist to travel .with- 
out fear on a wire suspended over the dizzy chasm of 
Niagara; which enables the marksman to raise his rifle. 
and, apparently without aim, to bring down a pigeon on 
the wing; which enables the painter to give the most 
delicate touches to his picture while engaged in conver- 
sation; which gives to the pianist his almost miraculous 
touch, so that, as his fingers run swiftly over the keys, 
they seem to be instinct with thought and feeling oozing 
from their tips. This automatic action, it is evident, must 
be a great help to the orator, relieving him, as it does, 
of much care, anxiety, and toil, and carrying him often- 
times triumphantly through his work without solicitude 
or conscious effort. Like all other advantages, however, 
it has its compensations; and if a speaker be naturally 
indolent, there is danger lest, instead of laboriously pre- 
paring himself, he should rely upon this faculty altogether. 
The result of so doing will be, as seen < in the melancholy 
case of those persons who are distinguished for the " gift 
of the gab," that he will speedily lose all true inspiration 
and force, and sink into a mere machine, like a barrel- 
organ, that plays over and over ad nauseam the same worn- 
out tones. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 

TT has been justly said that for the triumphs of elo J 
-*- quence, — for the loftiest displays of the art, — there 
must be something more than an eloquent man; there 
must be a reinforcing of man from events, so as to give 
the double force of reason and destiny. For the explo- 
sions and eruptions, "there must be some crisis in affairs; 
there must be accumulations of heat somewhere, beds of 
ignited anthracite at the centre. And in cases where 
profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man 
is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly 
drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, 
and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articu- 
lation. Then it rushes from him in short, abrupt screams, 
in torrents of meaning." Hence Goethe has somewhere 
said that to write is an abuse of words; that the impres- 
sion of a solitary reading replaces but sadly the vivid 
energy of spoken language; that it is by his personality 
that man acts upon man, while such impressions are at 
once the strongest and the purest. The immeasurable 
superiority of oratory spoken over oratory read, is known 
to all. When the contending forces are drawn out face 
to face, there is the excitement of a battle, and every 
blow which tells against the enemy is welcomed with the 
same huzzas that soldiers raise when a well-aimed shot 

9 193 



192 



194 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

makes a chasm in the ranks of the enemy, or demolishes his 
defenses. The effect, under such circumstances, of an over- 
whelming attack or of a scathing retort arises as much from 
the mental condition of the hearers as from the vigor of 
the blows. " It is because the powder lights upon a heated 
surface that an explosion is produced." Again, the electric 
sympathy of numbers deepens the impression, even when 
no exciting question is up, and no party feeling is kindled. 
An audience is not a mere aggregate of the individuals 
that compose it. Their common sympathy intensifies the 
feeling which the speaker produces, as a jar in a battery is 
charged with the whole electricity of the battery. The 
speech which would be listened to calmly by ten or a dozen 
persons, will thrill and electrify a multitude, as a jest will 
set the tables in a roar, which, heard by one man, will 
scarcely provoke a smile. Another secret of the superior- 
ity of spoken oratory, is the delight which is felt in im- 
promptu eloquence as a mere feat. The difficulty of pour- 
ing forth extempore beautiful or striking thought in apt 
and vivid language, especially for an hour or hours, is so 
great that only few can overcome it, and the multitude, 
who see something divine in such mysterious manifesta- 
tions of power, are ready to exclaim, as in the days of 
Herod, " It is the voice of a god! " The readers of a debate 
are under no such spell. The words do not come to them 
burning from the lips of the speaker, but impress them 
precisely as would the same quantity of printed matter 
coolly written for the press. They read passages which are 
reported to have drawn forth "thunders of applause" with- 
out emotion, and sarcasms which provoked "loud laughter" 
without being cheated into a single smile. Besides this, the 
figure, the voice, the magnetism of the speaker, do much 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 195 

to deepen the force and significance of his words. It is 
said that Erskine's looks spoke before his lips, and that 
his tones charmed even those who were too remote to 
catch his words. Demosthenes relied so much on action 
that he called it the first, second, and third requisite of 
an orator. Cicero declared that without it the greatest 
gifts -are unavailing, while with it mediocrity can surpass 
genius itself. The power of the orator lies less in what he 
says than in how he says it. A provincial actor will deliver 
the " farewell" speech of Othello word by word with literal 
correctness, and you will be as unmoved as himself ; the 
great actor speaks it, and you " read Shakspeare as by a 
flash of lightning." It is said that Macready never pro- 
duced a greater effect than by the words, "Who said that?" 
Garrick used to say that he would give a hundred guineas 
if he could say " Oh! " as Whitefield did. When Mirabeau's 
friend complained that the Assembly would not listen to 
him, that fiery leader asked for his speech, and the next day 
roused the Assembly by uttering as his own the words they 
had refused to hear from another. " The words were the 
same: the fire that made them thrilling and electric were 
not his friend's, but his own." 

There is another cause of the different impression which 
a speech produces when read from what it produced when 
heard; it lies in the very nature of the oratorical style. 
It has been justly said that that is good rhetoric for the 
hustings which is bad for a book. Fox, when told that 
a speech read well, said: "Then it must have been a bad 
speech." It is not to secure the " all hail, hereafter " 
that the orator aims, but at instant effect. The more ex- 
quisite his skill, — the more perfect his adaptation to his 
theme, his audience, and the occasion, — the more com- 



196 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

pletely his speech is evolved ex visceribus causae, — the 
less likely will he be to captivate the general reader, 
especially when the lapse of time has worked a revolution 
in tastes, or obscured his allusions, or robbed the topics 
themselves of their interest. On the other hand, the more 
his discourse is adapted to excite universal interest, and to 
appeal to the sympathies of after ages, — the more it 
abounds in thoughts and suggestions of universal interest, 
and gems of expression which are likely to sparkle for all 
time, — the less exact will be the adaptation to the audience 
and the occasion. It was the very qualities in Demos- 
thenes 1 speeches of which the modern reader is apt to 
complain, that made them so overwhelming in their effect 
upon his countrymen; and conversely, it was the very 
characteristics of Burke's philosophic harangues over which 
his hearers yawned, that will make them the delight of 
all posterity. 

The orator who is haranguing a promiscuous assembly 
must not proceed as if he were speaking in the schools. 
His oratory must be governed, indeed, by an enlarged 
philosophy, but he must not formally philosophize. The 
structure of his argument should be reared on broad and 
massy foundations, but in appearance it should be self- 
poised and pensile. While he should reason logically, he 
should make no parade of logic; the skeleton of his argu- 
ment should not force itself through the flesh. Except 
on rare occasions, when addressing a highly intellectual 
audience, he must repeat the same ideas in different words, 
— dwelling upon and reiterating his thoughts, till he is 
sure that he is understood and has made a deep impres- 
sion. There is a sort of previous lubrication, such as the 
boa-constrictor applies to the goat or bullock he digests, 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 197 

which is absolutely necessary to familiarize the popular 
mind with any truth, especially with one that is a start- 
ling or complex novelty. It becomes necessary, therefore, 
as a late writer says, to vary the modes of presenting it; 
putting it now directly before the eye, now obliquely; 
now in abstract form, now in the concrete; and he is the 
most skillful orator who can contrive the most cunning 
forms for appearing to say something new, when he is 
really but echoing himself, — who can break up massy 
chords into running variations, and mask, by slight differ- 
ences in the manner, a virtual identity in the substance. 
It was well said by Demosthenes that the power of 
oratory is as much in the ear as in the tongue. Fox 
advised Romilly, in an important trial, not to be afraid, 
in summing up the evidence, of repeating material ob- 
servations, as " it was better that some of the audience 
should observe it, than that any should not understand.' 1 
Erskine deemed it one of Fox's highest merits that he 
passed and repassed the same topics " in the most unfore- 
seen and fascinating review." He knew, adds Lord Stan- 
hope, that, by the multitude, one argument stated in five 
different forms, is, in general, held equal to five different 
arguments. Both Pitt and Brougham justify the practice 
of amplification, the latter declaring that the orator often 
feels that he could add strength to his composition by 
compression, but his hearers would then be unable to 
keep pace with him, and he is compelled to sacrifice con- 
ciseness to clearness. De Quincey, in his observations upon 
Greek literature, remarks that even an orator like Lord 
Bacon (as described by Ben Jonson) was too weighty, too 
massy with the bullion of original thought, ever to have 
realized the idea of a great popular orator, — one who 



198 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

" wields at will a fierce democracy," and ploughs up the 
great deeps of public sentiment or party strife, or national 
animosities, like a levanter or a monsoon. " If such an 
orator," says De Quincey, " had labored with no other de- 
fect, had he the gift of tautology? Could he say the same 
thing three times over in direct sequence? for, without 
this talent of iteration, — of repeating the same thought 
in diversified forms, — a man may utter good heads of 
an oration, but not an oration." 

It is true the Greek orators appear to have adopted 
a different practice from the moderns in this respect; 
but there is strong reason to believe that their harangues 
have not come down to us as they were delivered, — that 
they condensed them when they committed them to writ- 
ing. It was the opinion of Burke that not even an 
Athenian audience could have followed the orations of 
Demosthenes, if he had uttered them in the concentrated 
form in which they have come down to us; and Cicero 
objects to the Greeks that they sometimes carried brevity 
to the point of obscurity. But the expansion and repe- 
tition, which were a merit at the moment of delivery, 
become glaring defects when a speech is printed. " Bot- 
tom! thou art translated!" it has been justly said, might 
be placed as a motto under most collections of printed 
speeches. Pinkney recognized this truth when he began 
to write out his great speech in the Nereide case, and, 
disappointed in the effect when he saw it on paper, threw 
down his pen. In reading the sermons of George White- 
field we are puzzled to account for the prodigious effects 
they produced; but we forget that the sentiments which, 
as seen on the quiet page, seem so tame and common- 
place, were full of life, beauty, and power, when illus- 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 199 

trated by his musical intonation, the play of his feat- 
ures, and his apt gestures. As printed sermons they are 
" stale, flat, and unprofitable " ; but when rushing from 
the burning lips of the preacher, they wrought miracles, 
warmed the fastidious Hume and the haughty Bolingbroke 
into enthusiasm, and swept before them such towers of 
Sadduceeism as Franklin and Lord Chesterfield. 

One of the most eloquent preachers of the day was the 
late Dr. Guthrie, of Edinburgh; yet the reader of his 
sermons hardly discovers in them adequate proofs of 
this fact. Much of his charm lay in his illustrations, 
which were apt and striking as they came from his lips, 
but lose much of their impressiveness on paper. In lis- 
tening to his vivid appeals, a metaphor dazzled you and 
was gone; in his printed page, you examine it coolly and 
carefully; it is pinned down for you like a butterfly on 
a card, and you can critically finger it and pick holes in 
it. Hence, a reviewer of his published sermons, who would 
probably have been captivated by their delivery, com- 
plains that there is in them a great deal of illustration, 
and very little to illustrate; a very small army, but a most 
valorous noise of drums. The illustration, he says, " bears 
the same relation to the idea illustrated that the lion 
depicted on the outside of the menagerie, — a man beneath 
his royal foot, a horse flying afar, as with uplifted head 
and dishevelled mane he is engaged in sending forth his 
tremendous roar, which makes every creature of the wil- 
derness quake with fear, — bears to the ignoble and sleepy 
brute, which, when you enter, you find huddled down in 
a corner of his cage, no more like the king of beasts out- 
side, which is supposed to be his counterfeit presentment, 
'than I to Hercules.'" So with many political speeches 



200 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

whose reported effects seem so incredible; when they are 
printed, we have, it is true, " the self-same words, but not 
the self-same tune." The vehement gesture, the thunder- 
ing voice, the flashing eye, the curling lip, all " those brave 
sublunary things that made his raptures clear," — above 
all, the sympathy and applause of his hearers, which 
doubled the weight and force of his utterances, — are want- 
ing. In reading them at our leisure, pausing at every 
line, and reconsidering every argument, we forget that 
the hearers were hurried from point to point too rapidly 
to detect the fallacies by which they were cheated: that 
they had no time to disentangle sophisms, or to notice 
contradictions or inaccuracies of reasoning or expression. 
We forget that the sentence which seems so flat and 
unimpressive was made emphatic hx the ringing pro- 
nunciation: that the sarcasm which seems so pointless 
took all its venom from the contemptuous smile that ac- 
companied it; that the figure which seems so tawdry owed 
its vividness to the glance and the gesture; that the fallacy 
which looks so shallow derived its plausibility from the 
air of candor with which it was uttered. 

Again, in reading a speech in cold blood in the closet, 
we make a use of it for which it was not designed. 
We seek instruction or amusement, while the orator never 
intended to instruct or amuse. He sought only to per- 
suade. Wit. logic, philosophy, — every merit of thought 
or style which did not contribute to the end, — he sternly 
rejected. If repetition, exaggeration, sesquipedalian words, 
or bombast even, subserved his purpose, he employed it. 
As Selden says, " that rhetoric is best which is most sea- 
sonable and most catching." The blunt old English com- 
mander who addressed his men at Cadiz, was a true orator, 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 201 

if not a polished speaker: "What a shame will it be, you 
Englishmen, that feed upon good beef and beer, to let 
those rascally Spaniards beat you, that eat nothing but 
oranges and lemons!'" 1 O'Connell has been ridiculed for 
his blarney; but did not he, as well as his critics, know 
that he was talking nonsense when he harangued upon 
" hereditary bondsmen " and " the finest peasantry in Eu- 
rope"? Yet, while pouring out that nonsense, he was 
one of the mightiest, because one of the most successful, 
orators that ever roused men to act. Nothing can be 
more tawdry than a large part of the speech of Sheridan 
on the trial of Warren Hastings; but we know that it 
was a great speech, not because Burke has told us so, 
but from the effects it produced. Windham, himself 
an orator, declared twenty years afterward that it was 
the greatest speech within the memory of man; and the 
House of Commons confessed its power by adjourning on 
the ground that its members were too much excited to 
judge the case fairly. On the other hand, Sir James 
Mackintosh's "luminous and philosophical" disquisition on 
the Reform Bill we know was a failure, — and why? 
Because it was spoken to empty benches. And why was 
it spoken to empty benches? Because he spoke to the 
head, and not to the heart, — because he reasoned when 
he should have roused, — because, in fine, his talents were 
solid and substantial, not those which enable a speaker 
to produce with rapidity a series of striking but transi- 
tory impressions, and to excite the minds of five hundred 
men at midnight, without saying anything that any one 
of them will be able to remember in the morning. 

Hazlitt complains in one of his essays that the most 
dashing orator he ever heard, was the flattest writer he 



202 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

ever read. " In speaking, he was like a volcano vomiting 
out lava; in writing, he was like a volcano burnt out. 
Nothing but the dry cinders, the hard shell, remained. 
The tongues of flame with which, in haranguing a mixed 
assembly, he used to illuminate his subject, and almost 
scorched up the panting air, do not appear painted on the 
margin of his works." But ought this to have excited 
Hazlitt's surprise? Is it by profound learning and solid 
wisdom, by accuracy, depth, and comprehensive views, that 
men become masters of assemblies? A writer cannot be 
too profound, but a speaker may; and hence Archbishop 
Whately, in his " Rhetoric," seriously doubts whether a 
first-rate man can be a first-rate orator. The very habits 
of investigation, of accuracy, of thoroughness, of fastidi- 
ousness in the use of terms, which would qualify him for 
science and literary composition, would prove fatal to his 
harangue. Of the political orator, this is especially true. 
The larger his views, the more abundant his stores of 
knowledge, the more difficult will it often be to adapt him- 
self to the nimble movements of that guerrilla warfare in 
which debaters chiefly shine. Though his troops may be 
far more numerous than those of another combatant, and 
more heavily armed, yet because he is too fastidious. — be- 
cause he must pause to effect the best disposition of his 
battalions, — because his front and his rear must alike be 
cared for, before he will move, — he may be eclipsed by a 
person of far inferior powers, who yet can brilliantly ma- 
noeuvre his more manageable forces on a more limited field. 
Superior activity and command of weapons may often com- 
pensate for inferiority in strength. The tactics of Napo- 
leon, so irresistible in the field, are not less victorious in 
the senate. We are told that at an interview which took 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 203 

place after the battle of Austerlitz between Savary, his am- 
bassador, and the Emperor of Russia, Alexander paid a just 
tribute to the marvellous genius of his conqueror, but con- 
tended that the French army was double his own. " Your 
Majesty is misinformed," replied Savary; "our force was 
inferior to yours by at least twenty-five thousand men. 
But we manoeuvred much; and the same division combated 
at many different points." So is it oftentimes in debate. 

It is an old but just remark that eloquence is in the 
audience, not in the speaker. It is a harmony struck out of 
their mental chords by a master's hand. To play skillfully 
on this instrument he must be sincere. He must feel that 
he has gone to the bottom of his theme. But this is precisely 
what the deep thinker, trained to the most scrupulous accu- 
racy of investigation, — who sees all the sides of a question, 
and is fully alive to its difficulties, — cannot do. He can- 
not be fluent upon it, for in him fluency would be flippancy. 
Especially will this be the case, if the subject be a new one 
which he has never considered, or if some new point has 
come up suddenly in the course of a debate. Though he 
may take a juster view of it, on the spur of the moment, 
than a shallow thinker would, he cannot fail to see and feel 
how impossible it must be to do full justice to a subject 
demanding reflection and investigation; and, therefore, 
however great his wisdom, he will be unable to speak with 
the fluency, the easy, unembarrassed confidence of another 
who never looks below the surface of things, and gets his 
best views at the first glance.* And yet it is this fluent 

* Hence, as Hazlitt well remarks, " the distinction between eloquence and 
wisdom, between ingenuity and common sense. A man may be dexterous and 
able in explaining the grounds of his opinions, and yet may be a mere sophist, 
because he only sees one half of a subject. Another may feel the whole weight 
of a question, nothing relating to it may be lost upon him. and yet he may be 



204 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

utterance, with graceful action and elegant diction, — quali- 
ties that speak to the ear, to the eye, and not simply to the 
mind, — that most popular assemblies want. An English 
reviewer justly says that true political science is not merely 
needless in popular assemblies, it is positively distasteful, and 
those who are masters of it can rarely obtain it a hearing. 
The gorgeous imagery and lofty eloquence of Burke could 
not atone for the repulsiveness of his legislative wisdom, 
and few men spoke to thinner benches. Lord Chesterfield 
tells us that he entered the House of Commons with awe, 
but soon discovered that, of the five hundred and sixty 
members, not over thirty could understand reason. These 
thirty required plain sense in harmonious periods; the rest 
were a mob who were to be moved only by an appeal to 
their passions, their seeming interests, and their senses. 
Graceful utterance and action pleased their eyes, elegant 
diction tickled their ears, but they could neither penetrate 
below the surface, nor follow those who did. 

It may be thought that the House of Commons of to- 
day is a more intelligent body, and that, consequently, its 
requirements are higher. Not such is the judgment of 
some of the closest observers. " I find truisms, " Mr. Milner 
Gibson once observed to a friend, " the best things for the 
House of Commons. " ''A learned man in that body," says 
Sir Henry L. Bulwer, who takes an extremely cynical view 
of the matter, " is more likely to be wrong than any other. 
He fancies himself amid an assembly of meditative and 

able to give no account of the manner in which it affects him. or to drag his 
reasons from their silent lurking-places. This last will be a wise man, though 
neither a logician nor a rhetorician. Goldsmith was a fool to Dr. Johnson in 
argument; that is, in assigning the specific grounds of his opinion; Dr. Johnson 
was a fool to Goldsmith in the fine tact, the airy, intuitive faculty with which he 
skimmed the surfaces of things, and unconsciously formed his opinions.* 1 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 205 

philosophic statesmen; he calls up all his deepest thoughts 
and most refined speculations; he is anxious to astonish by 
the profundity and extent of his views, the novelty and 
sublimity of his conceptions; as he commences, the listen- 
ers are convinced he is a bore, and before he concludes, 
he is satisfied that they are blockheads. . . . The House 
of Commons consists of a mob of gentlemen, the greater 
part of whom are neither without talent nor information. 
But a mob of well-informed gentlemen is still a mob, 
requiring to be amused rather than instructed, and only 
touched by those reasons and expressions, which, clear to 
the dullest as to the quickest intellect, vibrate through 
an assembly as if it had but one ear and one mind." " It 
would be as idle," says Macaulay, " in an orator to waste 
meditation and long research on his speeches, as it would 
be in the manager of a theatre to adorn all the crowd of 
courtiers and ladies who cross over the stage in a proces- 
sion with real pearls and diamonds." No man in his day 
had taken a more exact account of the same House than 
Sir Eobert Peel; yet he tells us that arguments, to have 
weight with the representatives of the nation, must be 
" such as are adapted to people whoxknow very little of 
the matter, care not much about it, half of whom have 
dined or are going to dine, and are forcibly struck only 
by that which they can instantly comprehend without 
much trouble." 

As the object of public speaking in most cases is per- 
suasion, it is natural to regard success as the highest test 
of skill. "A great speech," O'Connell used to say, in speak- 
ing of forensic discourses, "is a very fine thing; but, after 
all, the verdict is the thing." There have been cases, no 
doubt, of triumph over adverse prejudices, where verdicts 



206 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

have been wrung from reluctant juries, or votes from 
hostile assemblies, under circumstances so unfavorable, 
that no higher proof could be afforded of the orator's 
ability and skill. Of all the testimonies to Cicero's ora- 
torical power, the most convincing is the fact we have 
already mentioned, that he made Caesar acquit the man 
he had resolved to condemn. It is said that the gay 
and gallant figure of Murat, when in the Russian cam- 
paign he rushed among the bristling lances of the enemy, 
as if to grasp the bloody hand of Death, and lead him 
down the dance, drew from the Cossacks loud cries of ad- 
miration. So when O'Connell, against fearful odds, dashed 
into the opposing ranks in the House of Commons, even 
Peel and Disraeli sometimes dropped their pencils and 
gazed in fascinated admiration at the orator, with his 
wondrous attitudes, and still more wondrous words and 
tones. On the other hand, there have been cases where 
the divinest eloquence, enforcing unwelcome truths, has 
been powerless against deep-rooted convictions and fore- 
gone conclusions, especially when fortified by self-interest 
and party or sectarian prejudice. As in war, it is not 
always the general who puts forth the highest strategical 
and tactical skill that is rewarded with victory in a battle 
or a campaign, because, though his plans may be perfect, 
they may still be defeated by any one of a hundred con- 
tingencies over which he has no control, and which no 
human sagacity could have foreseen, — so an orator may be 
baffled by prejudices against which the most cogent argu- 
ment and the most persuasive appeals may be directed 
in vain. 

"A jest's prosperity," says Shakspeare, "lies in the 
ear of him that hears it," and the same may be said of 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 207 

the success of a speech. The history of legislation in 
this country and England shows that there are times of 
violent party strife, when the most convincing oratory 
can avail nothing against the inexorable decrees of party 
and " the dead eloquence of votes." The burning appeals 
of Chatham did not prevent Great Britain from taxing 
and waging war upon her colonies; the great speech of 
his son upon the Slave-Trade, the most powerful oratorical 
effort of his life, did not win a majority of votes in the 
House of Commons against that iniquitous traffic; the almost 
superhuman eloquence with which Burke, Sheridan, and 
Fox shook Westminster Hall did not prevent Warren 
Hastings from going "unwhipt of justice"; nor did the 
Prince of Orators succeed, until after many impassioned 
and apparently fruitless appeals, in rousing his country- 
men to a sense of their danger from Philip of Macedon. 
O'Connell never made a finer exhibition of his parliament- 
ary powers than when, against fearful odds, and what he 
called " the beastly bellowings " of the House of Commons, 
he resisted the " Coercion Bill," introduced by Stanley. 
Erskine, in his advocacy of the people's rights before 
juries, was more successful than Curran; but in none 
of his addresses was he more eloquent than the brave 
Irishman, when, at midnight, in his defense of Bond, he 
rebuked the volunteers who clashed their arms as in de- 
fiance of his invectives, exclaiming, " You may assassinate 
me, but you shall not intimidate me"; nor in any of 
the fearful flashes of scorn with which Erskine scathed 
the band of informers, is there to be found a figure more 
striking than that of Curran, when he declaimed against 
the spies brought up after the rebellion from prisons, 
" those catacombs of living death, where the wretch that 



208 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

is buried a man lies till his heart has time to fester and 
dissolve, and is then dug up an informer." Champions 
of prisoners in the most remarkable state trials of their 
respective countries, they both, as Mr. Townsend has said,* 
struggled night after night, with all the resistless strength 
of eloquence; the one radiant of triumph and assured of 
victory, the other pale and steadfast in the energy of 
despair, certain of the result, but determined that all 
the decent rites of defense should be observed. In both 
cases, the populace, enthusiastic in their admiration, took 
the horses from their carriages, and by a voluntary degra- 
dation drew the orators to their homes. 

It is an interesting question discussed by Archbishop 
Whately, why so few persons have won high reputation 
as orators compared with the number of those who have 
attained eminence in other pursuits. His conclusion is, 
that vanity, — the love of admiration, — which is so common 
in men of every calling, and which, though it may impede, 
does not prevent success, in poetry, politics, war, etc., oper- 
ates as an absolute hindrance in oratory. The orator 
attains his ends the less he is regarded as an orator. A 
general reputation for eloquence may be advantageous; 
but on each individual occasion when he speaks, the more 
his hearers think of his eloquence, the less will they think 
of the strength of his cause. If he can make his hearers 
believe that he is not only a stranger to all unfair artifice, 
but even destitute of all persuasive skill whatever, he will 
persuade them the more effectually; and if there ever 
could be an absolutely perfect orator, no one would (at 
the time, at least) discover that he ivas so. Hence Shak- 
speare makes Mark Antony begin his famous speech over 

*" Lives of the Lord Chancellors." 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 209 

the dead body of Caesar by declaring, " I am no orator, 
as Brutus is"; and hence the "Quarterly Review" finds 
fault with the celebrated scene, Jeanie's interview with 
Queen Caroline, in " The Heart of Mid-Lothian." The 
Queen, in reply to Jeanie's rhetorical speech, is repre- 
sented as saying, " This is eloquence." Had it been elo- 
quence, says the reviewer, it must necessarily have been 
unperceived by the Queen. " If there is any art of which 
celare artem is the basis, it is this. The instant it peeps 
out, it defeats its own object by diverting our attention 
from the subject to the speaker, and that with a suspicion 
of his sophistry equal to our admiration of his ingenuity. 
A man who, in answer to an earnest address to the feel- 
ings of his hearer, is told, ' You have spoken eloquently,' 
feels that he has failed. Erne, when she entreats Sharp- 
itlaw to allow her to see her sister, is eloquent; and his 
answer accordingly betrays perfect unconsciousness that 
she has been so. 'You shall see your sister,' he began, 
' if youll tell me,' — then, interrupting himself, he added, 
in a more hurried tone, ' No, you shall see your sister, 
whether you tell me or no.' " In listening to eloquence 
of the highest order, we are so occupied with the thoughts 
presented to us, and hurried so impetuously toward the 
end proposed, that we no more regard the medium by 
which we are affected, than a starving man the dish in 
which food is offered to him, or than the recipient of 
startling news regards the looks and dress of the mes- 
senger. Fenelon, in his " Dialogues of the Dead," repre- 
sents Demosthenes as saying to Cicero, " Thou madest 
people say, 'How well he speaks!' but I made them say, 
' Let us march against Philip ! ' " Jefferson tells us that 

when Patrick Henry was making his great speeches, he 
9* 



210 ORATORY AXJ) ORATORS. 

always swept his hearers along with him, and it was not 
till they had left the court-room or the legislative hall, 
that they found themselves asking, "What did he say?' 1 
The same principle is illustrated by an anecdote told 
of Chief Justice Parsons, of Massachusetts. When he 
was practicing at the bar, a farmer who had often heard 
him speak, was asked by a stranger what sort of a pleader 
he was. "Oh. he is a great lawyer." was the reply: "he 
is an excellent counsellor; but he is a very poor pleader." 
"But does he not win most of his causes?" "Yes: but 
that's because he knows the law. and can argue well; but 
he is no orator." We were once talking with an intelli- 
gent old gentleman in Massachusetts, a hard-headed bank 
president, who had served as foreman of a jury in a law- 
ease, about the ability of Rufus Choate. " Mr. Choate," 
said he. " was one of the counsel in the case, and, know- 
ing his skill in making white appear black, and black 
white. I made up my mind at the outset that he should 
not fool me. He tried all his arts, but it was of no use ; 
I just decided according to the law and evidence." " Of 
course, you gave your verdict against Mr. Choate's client." 
"Why, no; we gave a verdict for his client; but then 
we couldn't help it; he had the law and the evidence on 
his side." It had never once occurred to the good man 
that he had been under a spell woven by one who was 
a master of his art. Mr. Parsons and Mr. Choate were 
both distinguished as verdict - getters. Unlike Parsons, 
many orators are tempted to sacrifice the substance to the 
shadow, by aiming at the admiration of their hearers, 
rather than at their conviction; while, on the other hand, 
some, like him, may have been really persuasive speakers, 
though they may not have ranked high in men's opinion, 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 211 

and may not have been known to possess that art of 
which they gave proof by skillful concealment of it. 

One of the reasons why the very name of rhetoric has 
fallen into disrepute in this age, is that the greatest artists 
strive to conceal their perfection in it; they endeavor to 
make their statements in such a way that the effect may 
seem to be produced by that which is stated and not by 
the manner in which it is stated. It was said of Sir James 
Scarlett, who, though an admirable speaker, indulged in 
no great feats of oratory, that his triumphs at the bar were 
so easy and natural that they did not seem triumphs at 
all. The Duke of Wellington declared that when he ad- 
dressed a jury, there were thirteen jurymen. A country- 
man who had been serving day after day on a jury which 
Mr. Scarlett had addressed, once paid him the highest 
compliment when he was undervaluing his qualifications. 
Being asked what he thought of the leading counsel, — 
" Well," was the reply, " that lawyer Brougham be a won- 
derful man; he can talk, he can; but I don't think nowt 
of Lawyer Scarlett." "Indeed!" exclaimed the querist, 
" you surprise me ! Why, you have been giving him all 
the verdicts." " Oh, there's nothing in that," said the 
juror; "he be so lucky, you see, he be always on the 
right side." This reminds one of Partridge, in Fielding's 
"Tom Jones." "He the best player!" exclaimed Part- 
ridge after seeing Garrick in Hamlet; " why, I could act as 
well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I 
should have looked in the same manner, and done just 
as he did. The King for my money; he speaks all his 
words distinctly, half as loud again as the others; any- 
body may see he is an actor." 

It will be seen from all this, also, that eloquence is a 



212 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

relative term. It is, as Dr. Campbell has properly defined 
it, "the art by which a discourse is adapted to its end": 
and therefore it is impossible to say of any discourse, 
abstractly considered, whether it is or is not eloquent, 
any more than we can pronounce upon the wholesome- 
ness of a medicine without knowing for whom it is in- 
tended. While there are certain qualities which all dis- 
courses should have in common, yet there are others which 
must vary with the varying capacities, degrees of intelli- 
gence, tastes, and affections of those who are addressed. 
The style of oratory that is fitted to kindle the enthusi- 
asm of Frenchmen, would often provoke only the mer- 
riment of Englishmen. The English are grave, matter- 
of-factish, sententious, and argumentative ; the French 
ardent, discursive, and brilliant. The French speaker 
abounds in facial expression and gesticulation; the Eng- 
lish stands almost motionless, clenching the desk with his 
hands, or burying them in his breeches pockets. Again, 
a speech addressed to an audience of scholars, exacts very 
different qualities from one addressed to the common 
people. It was said of one of John Foster's profound dis- 
courses when published, that " it should have been ad- 
dressed to an audience created for the purpose." The 
orator who throws a congregation of illiterate enthusiasts 
into tears, would raise affections of a very different kind, 
should he attempt to proselyte an American Senate; and 
again, the finest speaker that ever swayed a parliament- 
ary assembly, might try in vain to rouse or allay the 
passions of an uneducated mob. 

Indeed, it is a well-known fact that some of the most 
persuasive parliamentary orators have failed when out 
of their proper element, floundering like a fish on dry 



THE TESTS OF ELOQUENCE. 213 

land. If we may believe Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), the 
greatest member of Parliament that ever lived was Sir 
Robert Peel; "he played on the Honse of Commons as 
on an old fiddle " ; and yet, according to the same au- 
thority, " he could not address a public meeting, or make 
an after-dinner speech, without being ill at ease, and 
generally sajdng something stilted or even a little ridic- 
ulous." Mr. Cobden says of Lord John Russell: "On the 
boards of the House of Commons, Johnny is one of the 
most subtle and dangerous of opponents; take him off 
those boards, and I care nothing for him." On the other 
hand, O'Connell was equally at home in the forum, at the 
hustings, or in the House of Commons. Before he entered 
Parliament he was pronounced a mere " mob orator," and 
it was predicted by his enemies that in that body he 
was sure to " find his level." In 1830 he was elected to 
the House of Commons, and in 1831 he was listened to 
as the foremost orator in that assembly. It was said of 
Murray (Lord Mansfield), "that he refined too much, and 
could wrangle too little for a popular assembly," and hence 
he succeeded better in the House of Lords than in the 
House of Commons. The true orator will always study 
the character of his audience, and whether he is copious 
and flowing, or concise and pointed, — whether he arms 
himself with the thunders and lightnings of eloquence, 
or speaks " with bated breath and whispering humble- 
ness" in the mild tones of insinuation or persuasion. — he 
will at all times accommodate himself to his situation, 
becoming 

"Orpheus in silvis, inter delphinas Anon," 

and, if necessary, will, like Sylla, convert even the trees 
of the Academy into martial engines. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



PERSONALITIES IIS" DEBATE. 

A FOREIGN correspondent of an American journal, 
■^— *- who visited the British Parliament a few years 
ago, strikingly contrasts the courtesy of political oppo- 
nents in that body with the personalities which are so 
common in American legislatures. He says that the 
moment a member rises to address the House of Com- 
mons, he seems possessed by the most refined and gentle- 
manly consideration for others. In speaking of antagonists 
he carefully guards against the slightest imputation of dis- 
honorable motives; or if, in the heat of debate, a word of 
oblique significance slips from his tongue, he hastens to 
withdraw it, and to express his regret; nay, even in his 
sarcasms and home-thrusts, he is careful to mention some- 
thing to the credit of the very foeman he is about to 
scathe. Such a thing as hurling abusive epithets, giving 
the lie, and, above all, threatening personal violence, — 
practices so common as scarcely to create a sensation in 
our American legislatures, — would not be tolerated for a 
moment. When the Earl of Derby, in an attack on Lord 
John Russell, likened him to " Bottom the weaver," and 
described his policy by "the two homely words, meddle and 
muddle," it was felt that he went to the very verge of 
propriety. Great as was the ascendency of Lord Palmer- 
ston in that body, it never enabled him to lord it over his 

214 



PERSONALITIES IN DEBATE. 215 

fellow-Commoners so far as to be uncivil to the least popu- 
lar members of the House. When, on one occasion, he 
trespassed so far as to say impatiently of the not-over- 
popular Joseph Hume, " If the honorable gentleman's 
understanding is obtuse, it is not my fault," he was 
instantly brought to his senses by the reproachful mur- 
murs of the House, and was reminded that even Lord 
Palmerston must respect the fine code of legislative chivalry 
established there. 

What American, unless a politician, will not feel humili- 
ated by the contrast between this picture and the scenes 
often witnessed in Congress and our State legislatures? 
How often are epithets applied to each other, by our 
Senators and Representatives, which a fishwoman in Bil- 
lingsgate might delight to add to her already sparkling- 
vocabulary, but which 

"A beggar in his drink 
Would not bestow upon his callet." 

What must be a foreigner's impression, if, on visiting 
Congress, he should hear an altercation in which the 
vocabulary was exhausted by members for foul epithets 
to fling at each other, and see this followed, — as we have 
seen it, — by one of the pugilists rushing with turned-up 
sleeves into the arena before the Speaker, and shaking his 
clenched fist at his antagonist? Not always, however, did 
the British Senate transfuse debate with those graceful 
amenities which now do it honor, and which lift its dis- 
cussions so far above the hot and scurrilous word-brawls 
which politicians so often substitute for facts a*nd logic. 
The criminative fury with which Pulteney attacked Wal- 
pole, and Walpole attacked Pulteney, is well known to 
the readers of British history; Nearly all of Lord Chat- 



216 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

ham's most telling replies were bitter personalities, such 
as that to Walpole, when the latter twitted him , e his 
youth, and the fierce reply to Lord Holland, ' m, liv- 
ing him full in the face, he said: "There are some (per- 
sons) upon whose faces the hand of Heaven has so stamf e ' 
the mark of wickedness, that it were impiety no gfre 

it credit." Not less coarse were the invectives of Bu> V 
which sometimes degenerated into positive scurrility, x 
wisest man of his age, and possessing a profoundly phLj- 
•sophic intellect, he had at the same time so vehement a 
temperament, so acute a sensibility, and so excitable an 
imagination, — his affections were so warm, and his hatred 
of wrong so prompt and intense, even to morbidne. 
that, when his passions were once roused, they rag 
with a blind fury which mocked at all control. Hence, 
though naturally generous and forgiving, he pursued an 
antagonist as he would a criminal, and, while he thought 
like a philosopher, acted like a heated partisan. Who has 
forgotten his picture of Lord North: "The noble Lord 
who spoke last, after extending his right leg a full yard 
before his left, rolling his flaming eyes, and moving his 
ponderous frame, has at length opened his mouth." 

Again, who has forgotten the famous quarrel between 
Fox and Burke, or the Duke of Grafton's taunt at Thur- 
low'-s mean extraction, which drew down upon the assailant 
such a crushing reply; or who is not familiar with Grat- 
tan's retort upon Flood, the most artistic and overwhelming 
invective that has disfigured parliamentary debates ? Flood 
had taunted him with aping the style of Lord Chatham, 
and denounced him as " a mendicant patriot, subsisting 
upon the public accounts, — who, bought by his country for 
a sum of money, then sold his country for prompt pay- 



PERSONALITIES IN DEBATE. 217 

ment." , Grattan begins by supposing an imaginary char- 
acte whom he invests with all the faults of his opponent, 
a in " ' mi\ he traces his history. His evident intention 
is to keep up the transparent mask to the end of the speech, 
^nd then annihilate his rival by a word, — just as Broug- 
ha*r\, t -ty years later, directed a memorable attack upon 
.Coining. But, in the middle of the speech, the orator can 
strain his pent-up indignation no longer; the direct hos- 
tility which inspires the assault is too powerful to allow the 
flimsy pretext of an imaginary character, and Grattan 
bursts into one of those fiery onsets which no man ever led 
with more terrible effect: " The merchant may say to you, 
+ he constitutionalist may say to you, — the American may 
■\y to you, — and I, / now say, and say to your beard, sir, — 
you are not an honest man!''' "Can you believe," wrote 
General Burgoyne to Charles Fox, that " the House heard 
this discussion for two hours without interfering? On the 
contrary, every one seemed to rejoice as his favorite gladia- 
tor gave or parried a stroke." Even so late as 1840-41, 
we find Macaulay, in his Diary, complaining of the bitter 
personalities in the House of Commons. Speaking of the 
debate on Stanley's Irish Registration Bill, he says: *' I 
have never seen such unseemly demeanor, or heard such 
scurrilous language, in Parliament. . . . Lord Maidstone 
was so ill-mannered that I hope he was drunk. . . . O'Con- 
nell was so rudely interrupted that he used the expression 
' beastly bellowings.' Then rose such an uproar as no 0. 
P. mob at Covent Garden Theatre, no crowd of Chartists 
in front of a hustings, ever equaled. Men stood up on both 
sides, shook their fists, and bawled at the top of their voices. 
. . . O'Connell raged like a mad bull. ... At last the 
tumult ended from absolute physical weariness." 
10 



218 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

The name of Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) is associated 
with some of the most stinging personalities ever uttered 
in the British Legislature. One of his Hebrew country- 
men declares that ''he cannot shine without offensiveness, 
His passages of arms are not worth commemorating, un- 
less he draws blood." A greater master of cool, polished, 
searching irony, ridicule, and invective, probably never 
stood within the walls of St. Stephen. It has been truly 
said of him, that when he is prepared, not a blow misses: 
not a sarcasm is impeded by a weakening phrase. His 
peculiar tones, with his provoking frigidity of manner, and 
affected contempt for his foe, add much to the effect of his 
hits. In the Maynooth debate of 1845, he made an attack 
upon Sir Robert Peel, in which he said that " with him 
great measures were always rested on small precedents, 
that he always traced the steam-engine back to the tea- 
kettle; that in fact all his precedents were tea-kettle 
precedents/' Again, in a speech made m the House of 
Commons in 1846. Disraeli advised Peel to stick to quo- 
tation, because he never quoted any passage that had not 
previously received the meed of parliamentary " approba- 
tion"; compared him to the Turkish admiral who steered 
the fleet confided to him straight into the enemy's port; 
termed the Treasury Bench " political pedlars that bought 
their party in the cheapest market and sold us in the 
dearest"; and compared the conversion of the Peelites to 
that of the Saxons by Charlemagne, " who, according to the 
chronicle, were converted in battalions, and baptized in 
platoons." Peel was the chief target of Disraeli's sarcasms, 
and so dull and spiritless, comparatively, were his speeches 
after Peel's death, that Sheil compared him to a dissecting 
surgeon or anatomist without a corpse. Mr. Roebuck, whose 



PEESONALITIES IN DEBATE. 219 

name Disraeli associated with "Sadler's Wells sarcasms" 
and " melodramatic malignity," was another of his victims. 
One of his happiest hits was in a speech made a few years 
ago at Manchester, when he said: "As I sat opposite the 
Treasury Bench, the Ministers reminded me of those ma- 
rine landscapes not very unusual on the coast of South 
America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not 
a flame nickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation 
is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and 
ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea." 

The example of Lord John Russell is well worthy of 
imitation by debaters. There was never, it is said, the 
slightest acrimony in his personal allusions. His tri- 
umphs, won easily by tact and intellectual keenness, un- 
aided by passion, contrasted strikingly with "the costly 
victories of debaters like Lord Stanley, Disraeli, or Roe- 
buck." What could be happier than his reply to Sir 
Francis Burdett, who had accused him of indulging in 
" the cant of patriotism," — that " there was also such a 
thing as the recant of patriotism"? This mildness of 
tone, this well-bred, pungent raillery, which is now so 
generally characteristic of the English Parliament, has 
often proved a more effective weapon of debate than the 
most brilliant eloquence or the sharpest wit. " It draws 
a magic circle around the speaker, which only similar 
weapons can penetrate." 

The reply made many years ago by Mr. Trimble, of 
Ohio, to a personal attack made on him by the haughty 
and fierce George McDuffie, of South Carolina, is a happy 
illustration of the way in which personalities, when very 
exasperating, may sometimes, without a great breach of 
decorum, be successfully repelled. Mr. McDuffie, then a 



220 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

member of the House of Representatives, in a speech upon 
that floor, made a cunning and indirect assault upon Mr. 
Trimble, then comparatively obscure, and expectation was 
on tiptoe to see what course the latter would adopt. Every- 
body who heard Mr. McD. was well aware that his re- 
marks were intended to have a personal application; but 
so carefully were they guarded by skillful phraseology 
that to resent them would seem like fitting to one's back 
a coat not designed for his wearing. The next day, how- 
ever, Trimble replied in a speech of precisely the same 
character. Covertly, and with wonderful ingenuity, he 
attacked Mr. McDume in the same style, making no appli- 
cation to himself of the speech to which he was replying, 
— thus throwing upon his opponent all the responsibility 
of a quarrel. When Mr. Trimble had sat down, Mr. 
McDuffie arose, and. with looks and tones of vehement 
defiance, demanded a direct answer to the question whether 
the member from Ohio meant to be personal toward him- 
self in the remarks just submitted to the House. Calmly, 
imperturbably, the member from Ohio arose, and thus 
addressed the Speaker: "The member from South Caro- 
lina demands of me an answer to his question. I give 
it to him in a question to himself. Did he mean to be 
personal toward me, in his remarks of yesterday? If he 
did, then I did in mine of to-day. If he did not, I did 
not. He has my answer. If the gentleman from South 
Carolina meant nothing personal toward myself in the 
remarks he yesterda} T submitted to the House, then I did 
not mean personally to reflect upon him, or may I never 
see the smile of God! If the member from South Carolina 
meant aught personal with regard to me, then I meant 
to be just as personal toward him, or may the lightnings 



PERSONALITIES IN DEBATE. 221 

of heaven blast me where I stand! 1 ' Mr. McDuffie never 
replied. Who " took most by his motion," the reader can 
decide. 

It has always appeared strange to us that sagacious, 
thoughtful men should, in a deliberative assembly, where 
a majority of wills is to be obtained, so entirely lose sight 
of their interests as to be discourteous to their associates. 
No doubt there is something exciting in this species of 
intellectual gladiatorship, when private animosity as well 
as political rivalry sharpens men's differences, and the com- 
batants, in fierce personal grapples, shorten their swords 
for a death-blow. The parliamentary duello, when giants 
engage, tends to bring out in their perfection all the qual- 
ities of what is then most emphatically " the wrestling 
style." Unquestionably, the sceva indignatio of an enraged 
man has prompted many a burst of eloquence of which 
his intellectual power has been supposed to be the source. 
" If I wish to compose, or write, or pray, and preach well," 
Luther used to say, " I must be angry [zornig\ Then 
all the blood in my veins is stirred, my understanding is 
sharpened, and all dismal thoughts and temptations are 
dissipated." Doubtless by "anger" the great Reformer 
meant what we call indignation, and, where it is of a 
lofty moral character, there is nothing which gives a 
greater projectile force or a more permanent effect to 
human thought. Thackeray's literary faculty was fully 
equal to Swift's, but he produced a far feebler impression 
because he was devoid of the stern indignation, — the 
strong capacity for hatred, — which made the Dean the 
most terrible of satirists. "Junius" owed half his power 
to his fiery rage. Take from certain critical journals their 
ill-temper and impudence, and they would lose half of 



222 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

their brilliancy. Persons who recollected Mirabeau used 
to say that those who had not seen him speaking under 
the influence of anger, had not seen him; that it was 
in his rages that he was most superb. A mighty anger 
gives prodigious force to a speech or book; but for tem- 
porary purposes, mere hatred of the lowest sort, — pure 
spite, — is a most potent literary ingredient. An exceed- 
ingly small amount of intellectual power is sufficient to 
produce a very creditable effect, if it be fired by the 
gunpowder of a little anger. A secret consciousness of 
all this has, no doubt, led many a speaker to open the 
flood-gates of his wrath; still, the true orator will always 
be read}- to sacrifice himself, and his reputation for elo- 
quence, to gain his end; and he should, therefore, never 
forget that to conciliate is one of the chief arts and ends 
of debate. 

The authority of intellect is hard enough to maintain, 
even with the utmost winningness of manner and the 
blandishments of rhetoric. Unlike personal majesty, or 
the soul-subduing fascination of beauty, which are palpa- 
ble to the eye. it is an authority founded on opinion, — 
the opinion of associates; it is an ideal supremacy, which 
men readily deny when they choose, and always acknowl- 
edge with reluctance. A haughty, supercilious speaker 
on a legislative floor, who constantly assumes an air and 
an attitude of menace or defiance, and who vents on his 
opponents a deluge of angry invectives, is a positive injury 
to his constituents. Real intellectual blows, logical hard- 
hitting, the stern cut-and- thrust of mind, none will object 
to; but the effect of these on a high-minded opponent is 
very different from that of scorn or ridicule. So is the 
effect of playful wit or humor, as when Sir John Doyle, 



PERSONALITIES IN DEBATE. 223 

after a speech in the Irish Parliament by Dr. Duigenan, 
a very dark-featured man, against the Catholic claims, 
extinguished its effect by the Horatian line, " Hie niger 
est, hunc tu Romane caveto," which convulsed the House, 
— or, when Lord North, in reply to a fiery declaimer, who, 
after calling for his head, denounced him for sleeping, 
complained how cruel it was to be denied a solace which 
other criminals so often enjoyed, — that of having a night's 
rest before execution; or when, in reply to a dull, tedious 
speaker, who made a similar charge, he declared that it 
was unjust in the gentleman to blame him for taking 
the remedy which he himself had been so considerate as 
to administer. How happy his answer to an opponent 
who spoke of him as "that thing called a Minister!" "To 
be sure," he said, patting his portly sides, " I am ' a thing 1 ; 
when, therefore, the gentleman called me ' a thing,' he 
said what was true, and I could not be angry with him. 
But when he added, ' that thing called a Minister,' he 
called me that thing which of all others he himself most 
wished to be, and therefore I took it as a compliment." 
Such good humor and imperturbability can never be con- 
quered. For years Lord North carried on the contest, 
almost single-handed, against Fox, Burke, Barre, Dunning, 
and sometimes even Pitt, with the same genial spirit and 
jocularity, which nothing but a scandalous false quantity 
by Burke could lessen or disturb, and, when finally driven 
from office by a resistless combination of misfortunes and 
foes, he retired with the politest of bows and the blandest 
of smiles. 

It must be admitted, again, that occasions do sometimes 
occur in debate when plain, blunt words, — "words stript 
of their shirts," as an old poet calls them, — may, nay must, 



224 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

be used; and we must not confound the just though severe 
language of honest indignation, provoked by villainy or 
meanness, with that of him who is always ready to 

k> Unpack his heart in words, 
And fall a-cursing like a very drab. 
A scullion.'" 

There is a wide difference between the vituperation of a 
porter and that of a poet. The one recoils from the object 
of assault, and impinges upon the assailant; the other 
leaves a scar that can never be obliterated. The one, as 
Christopher North says, is "like mud thrown by a brutal 
boor on the gateway of some glorious edifice " ; the other 
is a flash of lightning from on high, that brands a Cain- 
mark on the forehead, which makes it repulsive forever. 
After making all deductions, nevertheless, it must be ad- 
mitted that the discreet speaker, who wishes to convince 
or persuade, will abstain from personalities. When a man 
is smarting under the stings of a merciless sarcasm, he 
is as impassive to reason as if he were drunk or mad. 
For the sake of their own reputation, therefore, — as con- 
vincing debaters, to say nothing of the interests they 
advocate, — members of legislative bodies should beware of 
rousing to obstinacy their associates, by violating the cour- 
tesy which should mark the collision, not less than the 
friendly intercourse, of cultivated and polished minds. We 
might add that the meanest insect has its sting, and that 
men who wantonly seek to wound their inferiors, whom 
they deem incapable of defending themselves, often, in 
the blindness of their insolence, tread on a scorpion in- 
stead of a worm, and receive a sting where they only 
anticipated the pleasure of seeing a victim writhe. It is 
said of Dr. Priestley that, in all his controversies, verbal 



PERSONALITIES IN DEBATE. 225 

or written, he never gave offense by an allusion or a 
word; and we may add that Lord Castlereagh, who was 
so successful in the British Parliament, carried ten points 
by his good humor, courtesy, and personal influence, to 
every one that he carried by his logic. These qualities 
made him a favorite with the House of Commons, though 
he sorely taxed its patience, and sometimes tried its 
gravity; as when he spoke of "the Herculean labor of the 
honorable and learned member, who will find himself quite 
disappointed when at last he brings forth his Hercules" 
On the other hand, O'Connell, mighty as was his elo- 
quence, neutralized its influence in a great measure by 
the frequency and bitterness of his sarcasms. It was 
said of him that his mind consisted of two compart- 
ments, — the one inhabited by the purest angels, the other 
by the vilest demons, — and that the occupation of his life 
was to transfer his friends from the one to the other. The 
Duke of Wellington he stigmatized as " a stunted corpo- 
ral"; while to other opponents he applied such terms as 
" a mighty big liar," or " a lineal descendant of the impeni- 
tent thief," or "a titled buffoon," or "a contumelious cur," 
or " a pig," or " a scorpion." A speaker who uses such 
epithets puts himself beyond the pale of courtesy; and we 
are not surprised, therefore, to learn that the great agi- 
tator prejudiced all moderate men against him, embar- 
rassed his action in the House of Commons, and finally 
drew down upon himself its formal reprimand. 



CHAPTER IX. 



POLITICAL ORATORS: ENGLISH. 

" We. we have seen the intellectual race 
Of giants stand, like Titans, face to face,— 
Athos and Ida.— with a dashing sea 
Of eloquence between, which flowed all free. 
As the deep billows of the JSgean roar 
Betwixt the Hellenic and the Pelasgic shore."— Byron. 

OF modern countries, no one. except perhaps France, 
has been more prolific of great orators than Great 
Britain. It is, however, a remarkable fact, that, though 
there were great debaters, there was hardly one preeminent 
orator in England till the time of the brilliant and versa- 
tile Bolixgbroke. Ben Jonson has left us a memorial of 
Bacon's way of speaking, and those who are familiar with 
the " Essays " and the " Advancement of Learning " can 
easily imagine with what majesty he spoke, and what illu- 
minations of original thought characterized his addresses. 
As an orator, he was stately, weighty, and convincing, — the 
very opposite of a declaimer. A studied speaker, he affected 
gravity and wise sententiousness; speaking " leisurely, and 
rather drawlingly than hastily," on the principle that " a 
slow speech comfirmeth the memory, — addeth a conceit of 
wisdom to the hearers, besides a seemliness of speech and 
countenance." " No man," says Jonson, "spoke more press- 
ly, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he ut- 
tered. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from 
him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BOLINGBROKE. 227 

his judges angry and pleased at his discretion. The fear 
of every one that heard him was that he should make an 
end." During the Commonwealth, when the highest in- 
terests were imperilled, and men's hearts were stirred to 
their very depths, neither Cavaliers nor Puritans put for- 
ward a single great orator. Strafford, indeed, defended 
himself with genuine eloquence; but in vain shall we look 
elsewhere for great thoughts conveyed in burning words, 
or for maxims which have become the current coin of the 
realm. The speeches of Pym are able, but tedious and 
dreary, and we wonder that enthusiasm could ever have 
found expression in language so cold and spiritless. At 
the Restoration the style of speaking changed; "the Cava- 
liers were men of the world, who talked the language of 
the world. They flung aside that heavy scholastic garb 
which stifled sentiments instead of adorning them, and 
made a closer approximation to simplicity and to nature." 
It was not till Queen Anne's reign, that parliamentary elo- 
quence took the form which it wears to-day, and of that 
reign the foremost speaker was Bolingbroke. 

To the rare gifts of this remarkable man all his con- 
temporaries have testified in the most enthusiastic terms. 
Nature seems to have lavished upon him nearly all the 
qualities necessary to a great parliamentary speaker. Tall, 
graceful, with handsome features lit up from time to time 
by the fire in his eyes, or his bright, winning smile, — pos- 
sessing a rich, musical voice, of more than ordinary modu- 
lation and power, and an easy, impressive action, — he 
added to these advantages an unrivalled quickness of ap- 
prehension, a logical understanding, a lively fancy, a 
sparkling wit, an exquisite taste, and a memory so tena- 
cious that he was wont to complain of it as inconvenient, 



228 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

and to allege it as an excuse for limiting his reading to the 
best authors. Still further to qualify him for leadership, 
he had read all the best Latin authors, had acquired a 
thorough knowledge of the best writers in the English and 
other modern languages, had given considerable time to 
metaphysics, and to an unusual acquaintance with ancient 
had added a consummate knowledge of modern histor}'. 
Besides all these qualifications, he had the fire and energy 
which belong to genius only; and such, we are told, was 
his facility of expression, that even in the abandonment 
of familiar conversation, his words would have stood the 
test of the severest criticism. He spoke with such taste 
and accuracy that his language might have been printed, 
without discredit to him, as it fell from his lips. Lastly, 
he had, what was a more signal advantage in those days 
than now, the prestige of high birth and ample fortune. 
Entering Parliament at the age of twenty-two, he won 
almost at a bound the reputation of being the most bril- 
liant and fascinating orator of his time. His fastidious 
contemporaries regarded his eloquence as almost super- 
natural. Chesterfield, himself an accomplished speaker, 
pronounces him the model ideal orator, and Chatham, the 
only Englishman who could contest his claim to the palm, 
declared that he would rather win from oblivion Lord 
Bolingbroke's unreported speeches than the lost books of 
Livy, — an opinion indorsed by the severer taste of Chat- 
ham's son. Unfortunately not one of the speeches of the 
British Alcibiades has come down to us; and therefore, 
though we may criticise, if we please, the theatrical tone 
of Chatham, or the floridity of Sheridan's Begum effusion, 
we must accept the uniform traditional reports of Boling- 
broke's eloquence, as we admit the greatness of Garrick 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BOLINGBROKE. 229 

as an actor. Of one department of oratory he was, be- 
yond dispute, a consummate master. In invective, at 
once passionate and dignified, furious yet not extravagant, 
he had no equal. No other speaker of his age could bend 
that silver bow, or launch those deadly arrows. Perhaps 
the highest tribute ever paid to his oratorical genius was 
that paid by his old enemy, Sir Robert Walpole, the 
British premier. When Bolingbroke's attainder was re- 
moved, and he was allowed to return from banishment 
and resume his family estate in England, he was not 
allowed to resume his seat in the House of Peers. All 
else was restored to him, but the sagacious premier dared 
not restore to his adversary the privilege of raising his 
voice in Parliament, lest the throne of the Guelph should 
reel before the sound of its trumpet-peal, — a tacit homage 
to his eloquence which far transcends any spoken praise. 
Though Bolingbroke's speeches have not come down 
to us, yet his writings have, and from these we can form 
an idea, not altogether inadequate, of his powers as an 
orator. Generally there is a great difference between a 
man's styles as a writer and a speaker; but Bolingbroke 
was an exception to the rule. His style is clear, nervous, 
flowing, idiomatic, attractively colored, and tastefully em- 
bellished, manifesting much of Addison's elegance without 
his tameness, and the sententious dignity of Johnson with- 
out his pomposity. It abounds especially in periodical 
climax, and signally illustrates Quintilian's rule for sen- 
tential increase, augere debent sententiae et insurgere. Few 
writers have combined in so happy proportions the Latin 
and the Saxon elements of our tongue. Chesterfield de- 
clared that till he read Bolingbroke, he did not know the 
extent and power of the English language; it was not 



230 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

a studied or labored eloquence, he said, but a flowing 
happiness of expression. A recent English writer says: 
" I unhesitatingly place him at the head of all the prose 
writers of our language." * Among his most striking 
merits are the beauty and propriety of his images and 
illustrations, which are never introduced for mere orna- 
ment, but to support the argument they adorn, — like 
buttresses, which, however relieved with tracery, add an 
air of solidity to the building they prop. In his Letter 
to Windham, he says: "The ocean which environs us is 
an emblem of our government, and the pilot and the 
minister are in similar circumstances. It seldom happens 
that either of them can steer a direct course, and they both 
arrive at their port by means which frequently seem to 
carry them from it." Again, in " The Spirit of Patriotism," 
he says: "Eloquence must flow like a stream that is fed 
by an abundant spring, and not spout forth a little frothy 
water on some gaudy day, and remain dry all the rest 
of the year." 

Lord Lytton says truly of Bolingbroke, that his sen- 
tences "flow loose as if disdainful of verbal care; yet 
throughout all there reigns the senatorial decorum. The 
folds of the toga are not arranged to show off the 
breadth of the purple hem; the wearer knows too well 
that, however the folds may fall, the hem cannot fail to be 
seen." It is an interesting fact noted by the latest bi- 
ographer of Bolingbroke, that his literary works resemble 
spoken eloquence far more than those of any other man 
that ever wrote. They are clearly the composition of an 
orator, who, being prevented from addressing an audi- 
ence by word of mouth, uses the pen as his instrument, 

* " Memoirs of Eminent Etonians," by Sir Edward Creasy. 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BOLINGBROKE. 231 

and writes what he would have spoken. Not only is his 
method, or rather lack of method, oratorical, discussing 
$he subject as he does in the first way that presents it- 
self, and handling it skillfully, earnestly and strikingly 
in many of its parts, but never exhausting it, — but the 
diction, as Lord Brougham remarks, " is eminently that 
of oratorical works. It is bold, rapid, animated, yet 
pointed and correct, bearing the closest scrutiny of the 
critic when submitted to the eye in the hour of calm judg- 
ment, but admiringly calculated to fill the ear, and carry 
away the feelings in the moment of excitement." Again, 
it is well known that he disliked the mechanical drudg- 
ery of writing: that he could not bear to develop his 
ideas on paper with the pen, but employed an amanuensis, 
and dictated many of his literary productions. " When he 
wrote," says Mr. Macknight, "he was addressing an imagi- 
nary audience, exciting imaginary cheers, and frequently 
defying and assailing a hated rival, who was not at all 
imaginary; but whether in youth or age, — while St. John, 
speaking in the House of Commons, or, as Viscount Bol- 
ingbroke, composing the letters to the 'Craftsman,' — still 
the same unconquered and unconquerable foe." 

Lord Brougham, at the end of his well-known sketch 
of Bolingbroke, expresses the opinion that if the con- 
curring accounts of witnesses, and the testimony to his 
speeches borne by his writings, may be trusted, "he must 
be pronounced to stand, upon the whole, at the head of 
modern orators. There may have been more measure 
and matured power in Pitt, more fire in the occasional 
bursts of Chatham, more unbridled vehemence, more intent 
reasoning in Fox, more deep-toned declamation in passages 
of Chatham, more learned imagery in Burke, more wit 



232 ORATORY A^D ORATORS. 

and humor in Canning: but, as a whole, and taking in 
all rhetorical gifts, and all the orator's accomplishments, 
no one, perhaps hardly the union of several of them, 
can match what we are taught by tradition to admire 
in Bolingbroke's spoken eloquence, and what the study 
of his works makes us easily believe to be true." 

Far above Bolingbroke, we think (notwithstanding the 
high authority just quoted), and overtopping every other 
orator Great Britain has produced, stands Lord Chatham. 
It was in 1736 that the voice of "the great Commoner" 
was first heard within the walls of Parliament, eliciting 
from Sir Robert Walpole the exclamation, i; We must 
muzzle that terrible cornet of horse." Few orators of equal 
fame have been, in some respects, so poorly equipped. 
Great as was his genius, it was far from being well-bal- 
anced and disciplined; there was, indeed, a certain mixture 
of splendor and slovenliness in his character. Dr. King 
declared that he had no learning, and Lord Chesterfield that 
not only did he have very little political knowledge, but 
that his matter was- generally flimsy, and his arguments 
often weak. His sister, Mrs. Anne Pitt, used to say sarcas- 
tically that he had read no book but the " Faery Queen." It 
is well known, however, that, to gain a mastery of language, 
he translated the speeches of Demosthenes into English, and 
pondered over the weighty periods of Barrow till he had 
many of his long and exhaustive sermons almost by heart. 
He also read Bailey's Dictionary twice through, and even 
articulated before a glass to perfect the use of his native 
tongue. But though his intellectual acquisitions were com- 
paratively slender, few men have received from nature so 
many of the outward qualifications of the orator. In his 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CHATHAM. 233 

best days, before lie was crippled by the gout, he had a tall 
and striking figure, an imposing attitude, aquiline and noble 
features, and a glance of fire. His voice was a marvel- 
lous combination of sweetness and strength. It had all 
the silvery sweetness of a Clay's or a Phillips's, and was 
distinctly heard even when it sank to a whisper; its middle 
notes were charming and beautifully varied, while its 
higher tones, which completely filled the House, pealed 
and thrilled like the swell of some majestic organ. " The 
effect was awful," says one who heard him, " except when 
he wished to cheer or animate; then he had spirit-stirring 
notes which were perfectly irresistible." 

His speeches, as they have come down to us, are con- 
fessedly fragments; but even these "shreds of unconnected 
eloquence " are without a parallel. They blaze with the 
authentic fire of the imagination, — of the imagination in 
the full sweep of excited and overmastering feeling. They 
are the masterful words of a great man; haughty and ar- 
rogant words sometimes, no doubt, but haughty and arro- 
gant because the speaker, in the pride of his integrity, 
scorned from the depths of his soul all meanness, and 
baseness, and finesse. Grattan said of his eloquence, that 
it was an era in the Senate: that it resembled sometimes 
the thunder, and sometimes the music, of the spheres In 
purely physical influence over his audience he was never 
surpae^d. No other orator ever approached him in the 
sway which he exercised over his hearers, while the spell 
of his voice, his eye, his tones, his gestures, was upon them. 
He entered the lists like a gladiator. Seizing on some 
stronghold in the argument, — some stubborn fact, — he 
held it with a giant's grasp. He did not argue with his 
opponents, but asserted; he wrested their weapons out of 
10* 



234 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

their hands by main force. The ipsi dixi, the " I affirm," 
" I am ready to maintain, ' ' " I pledge myself to prove," 
constituted all his logic. 

In moments of intense passion he was like the Sibyl on 
her tripod. The oldest member, the hardiest wit of the 
House, quailed before " the terrors of his beak and the 
lightning of his eye.'* Having a perfect mastery of his 
subject, a thorough conviction, an intense interest, he 
instinctively and unavoidably, by his vehemence of man- 
ner, his tones, his commanding attitudes and eager ges- 
tures, conveyed these to his hearers. His will was sur- 
charged with electric matter, and all who stood within its 
reach felt the force of the shock. Employing a bold, brief, 
and pointed mode of expressing daring truths, sometimes 
by metaphor, sometimes by antithesis, and possessing a 
spirit as dauntless as his language, he defied contradiction, 
and any attempt to check him only drew from him an in- 
dignant and defiant repetition of the offense. 

Never was there a more terrible antagonist. — one who 
awed his opponents more by the fierceness and boldness 
of his invectives, or roused popular enthusiasm to a higher 
pitch by the short and vehement sentences in which he 
embodied the feverish passions of the hour. It is said 
that once in the House of Commons he began a speech with 
the words, "Sugar. Mr. Speaker."' — and then, seeing a 
smile pervade the audience, he paused, glared fiercely 
around, and, with a loud voice, rising in his notes, and 
swelling into vehement anger, he pronounced again the 
word " Sugar !'" three times. Having thus quelled the 
House, and dispelled every appearance of levity or laugh- 
ter, he turned round and scornfully asked: "Who will 
laugh at sugar now?" Charles Butler states in his "Re- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CHATHAM. 235 

miniscences " that on another occasion Lord Chatham rose 
and walked out of the House, at his usual slow pace, 
immediately after he had finished his speech. A silence 
ensued till the door opened to let him into the lobby; and 
then a member started up, saying, " I rise to reply to the 
honorable member. 1 ' Lord Chatham turned back, and 
fixed his eye on the orator, who instantly sat down dumb: 
then his lordship returned to his seat, repeating, as he 
hobbled along, the verses of Virgil: 

"At Danafim proceres, Agamemnoniaeque phalanges, 
Ut videre virutn fulgentiaque arma per umbras 
Ingenfci trepidare metu: pars vertere terga. 
Ceu quondam petiere* rates: pars tollere vocem 
Exiguam: inceptus clamor frustratur Mantes." 

Then, placing himself in his seat, he exclaimed: "Now 
let me hear what the honorable member has to say to me." 
When Mr. Butler asked the person, an eye-witness, from 
whom he obtained this anecdote, if the House did not laugh 
at the ridiculous figure of the poor member, he replied: 
"No, sir, we were all too awed to laugh." 

Mr. Butler gives another still more striking illustration 
of the manner in which the haughty orator overawed his 
associates. Moreton, Chief Justice of Chester, happened to 
say in the House, " King, Lords, and Commons, or (looking 
at the first Pitt) as that right honorable member would 
term them, Commons, Lords, and King." Pitt called him 
to order, and desired the words to be taken down. They 
were written down by the clerk. " Bring them to me," 
said Pitt, in his loftiest tone. By this time Moreton was 
frightened out of his senses. " Sir," he stammered out, 
addressing the Speaker, " I am sorry to have given any 
offense to the right honorable member or to the House. 
I meant nothing. King, Lords, and Commons, — Lords, 



236 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

King, and Commons, — Commons, Lords, and King: tria 
juncta in uno. I meant nothing; indeed, I meant noth- 
ing." Pitt rose: " I don't wish to push the matter further. 
The moment a man acknowledges his error, he ceases to 
be guilty. I have a great regard for the honorable mem- 
ber, and as an instance of that regard, I give him this 
advice: whenever he means nothing, I recommend him to 
say nothing." It was the dramatic genius of Chatham, 
his perfect acting, that achieved these victories; without 
it, some of his most splendid bursts would have been 
failures. So consummate were his gesture and delivery, 
that Horace Walpole often calls him " Old Garrick." 

Even the infirmities of Chatham were turned to ac- 
count: his flannel bandage aided his touches of pathos, and 
even his crutch became a weapon of oratory. It is true 
he was singularly wordy: yet in this very trick of ver- 
bal reduplication lies half his strength. Such pleonasms 
as "I was credulous, I was duped, I was deceived," — "It 
was unjust, groundless, illiberal, unmanly," occur again 
and again. — " I am astonished, I am shocked, to hear such 
principles confessed ; to hear them avowed in this House 
and in this country." — " The country was sold at the late 
peace; it was sold by the Court of Turin to the Court of 
France." — "A breach has been made in the Constitution. — 
the battlements are dismantled, the citadel is open to the 
first invader, the walls totter, the place is no longer ten- 
able; what then remains for us but to stand foremost in 
the breach, to repair it. or to perish in it?" "To main- 
tain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on 
the other side of the Atlantic and on this. ' 'Tis liberty 
to liberty engaged,' that they will defend themselves, their 
families, and their country. In this cause they are im- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CHATHAM. 237 

movably allied; it is the alliance of God and of nature, — 
immutable, eternal, — fixed as the firmament of heaven" 

Like Danton, he relied on Vaudace, as in the famous 
passage where he declared, "I rejoice that America has 
resisted," and when, with even more defiance, he said: "I 
hope some dreadful calamity will befall the country, that 
may open the eyes of the King. 11 Here, according to 
Grattan, he introduced an allusion to the figure drawing 
the curtains of Priam, and gave the quotation, when he 
was called to order, but went on: " What I have spoken I 
have spoken conditionally, and I now retract the condition. 
I speak it absolutely, and I hope that some signal calamity 
will befall the country. 11 He bore down all by his inten- 
sity, by reiterating blow upon blow, as upon an anvil. 
"I say we must necessarily undo these violent, oppressive 
acts. They must be repealed. You will repeal them. I 
pledge myself for it that you will in the end repeal them. 
I stake my reputation on it. I will consent to be taken for 
an idiot, if they are not finally repealed. 11 " Conquer the 
Americans! 11 he exclaimed: "I might as well think of 
driving them before me with this crutch ! " "I come not 
here armed at all points with law-cases and acts of par- 
liament, with the statute-book doubled down in dogs-ears, to 
defend the cause of liberty" he exclaimed with superb scorn, 
in answer to Grenville's argument upon the right to tax 
the colonies. Again, addressing the Administration of 
Lord North, he said: "Such are your well-known charac- 
ters and abilities, that sure I am that any plan of recon- 
ciliation, however moderate, wise, and feasible, must fail 
in your hands. Who, then, can wonder that you should 
put a negative on any measure which must annihilate your 
power, deprive you of your emoluments, and at once 



238 ORATORY AJs T D ORATORS. 

reduce you to that state of insignificance for which God 
and nature designed you?" 

Never was there an orator who spoke more completely 
from the impulse of the moment. Bestowing no care on 
his language, imagery, or illustrations, he poured out his 
thoughts just as they rose in his teeming and fiery brain; 
and when he rose, stirred to anger by some sudden sub- 
terfuge of corruption or device of tyranny, there was 
heard an eloquence never surpassed in ancient or modern 
times. Eloquent as he was. however, he impressed every 
hearer with the conviction that the man was greater than 
the orator. His whole manner was kingly. He was one 
of nature's autocrats, to whom men yielded by instinct. 
" There was a grandeur in his personal appearance," says 
a writer who speaks of him in his decline, " which pro- 
duced awe and mute attention: and though bowed by 
infirmity and age, his mind shone through the ruins of 
his body, armed his eye with lightning, and clothed his 
lip with thunder. " " : He was born an orator," says 
Wilkes, " and from nature possessed every outward re- 
quisite to bespeak respect, and even awe; a manly figure, 
with the eagle eye of the great Conde, fixed your atten- 
tion, and almost commanded reverence the moment he 
appeared: and the keen lightning of his eye spoke the 
high respect of his soul before his lips had pronounced a 
syllable. There was a kind of fascination in his look 
when he eyed any one askance. Nothing could withstand 
the force of that contagion. The fluent Murray has fal- 
tered, and even Fox shrunk back appalled from an ad- 
versary ' fraught with fire unquenchable,' if I may bor- 
row an expression of our great Milton." Even Franklin 
lost his coolness, when speaking of Lord Chatham. " I 



POLITICAL ORATORS — PITT. 239 

have sometimes,'' said he, " seen eloquence without wisdom, 
and often wisdom without eloquence; but in him I have 
seen them united in the highest possible degree.""^ 

As the veteran gladiator was borne away from the 
arena, two youthful athletes appeared upon it, — Charles 
James Fox and William Pitt. If the elder Pitt was an 
orator by nature, the younger Pitt was no less truly an 
orator by art. Not that he lacked genius, for he was a 
marvel of precocity; but from his earliest youth he was 
unwearied in the pains he took to qualify himself for 
debate. Even in childhood he seemed to have an instinc- 
tive perception of the bent of his talents. When only 
seven years of age, he told his tutor how glad he was at 
not being the eldest son, for " he wanted to speak in the 
House of Commons like papa." A year later Lady Hol- 
land, who saw him at Lady Hester Pitt's, wrote to her 
husband: "He is really the cleverest child I ever saw, 
and brought up so strictly and so proper, that, — mark my 
words, — that little boy will prove a thorn in Charles's* 
side as long as he lives." But great as were his natural 
gifts, he did not rely upon them, but strove in every way 
to perfect himself in the accomplishments necessary to the 
orator. Not only did the gouty Earl, his father, watch 
his early education with jealous care, but he had himself 
so earnestly seconded his father's efforts that, in spite of 
his bodily weakness, when he went to Cambridge in 1773, 
a boy of fourteen, he was already, in parts and learning, 
a grown man. From the earliest childhood his powers 
of speech had been trained in every possible way, — by 
reciting daily choice passages from the best English au- 

* Charles James Fox. 



240 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

thors, by rendering aloud pages of some Greek or Roman 
orator into choice and nervous English, by studying with 
minute attention the works of Bolingbroke and Barrow, 
of Polybius and Thucydides, and by dwelling for hours 
together on some striking passage in the masterpieces of 
ancient oratory. The debate in Pandemonium, says Ma- 
caulay, was one of his favorite passages, and his early 
friends used to talk together, long after his death, of the 
just emphasis and melodious cadence with which they had 
heard him recite the incomparable speech of Belial. 

Even after he had taken his Master's degree at the 
University, at the age of seventeen, he still kept his 
terms, and read with his tutor for four more years. By 
the end of this time he had gone through almost every 
known Greek and Latin author, had made some progress 
in the study of natural philosophy and civil law, and in 
mathematics had gained a proficiency which qualified him 
to stand for wrangler's honors. Though not fond of com- 
position in the dead languages, he read classic authors 
with intense delight, — catching instinctively the meaning 
of the hardest passages, dwelling especially on the niceties 
of language and the differences of style, and discriminating 
the essential from the non-essential in such studies with 
almost intuitive quickness and tact. So complete was 
his mastery of the Greek that his tutor declared his firm 
belief that no one ever read it, even after devoting a whole 
life to its study, with greater facility than did Pitt at 
twenty-one. Lord Grenville afterward pronounced him 
the best Greek scholar he ever conversed with; and Lord 
Wellesley said that " with astonishing facility he applied 
the whole spirit of ancient learning to his use." It was, 
however, to the orators of antiquity that he turned with 



POLITICAL OKATOKS — PITT. 241 

the most instinctive fondness; loving, especially, to com- 
pare the opposite speeches on the same subject supplied 
by Thucydides, Livy, and Sallust. Besides these studies, 
he familiarized himself with Shakspeare and Milton, Hume 
and Robertson, and thoroughly analyzed and mastered the 
great Essay of Locke. Not only his favorite studies, but 
other circumstances, indicated the bias of the future orator. 
The barber who attended him, on approaching the oak door 
of his room, overheard him declaiming to himself within. 
Before other boys left school, he was holding mock debates 
at the "Crown and Anchor," in London, and astonishing 
men who lived to see his great parliamentary triumphs, 
and who declared that even these did not surpass the efforts 
of the amateur. Long before he scandalized the dons of 
Cambridge by presuming to set up for an M. P. at the 
University, the young athlete was to be seen in the gallery 
of . the House of Commons, exercising his memory, and 
training himself for his future struggles by hearing and 
answering in his own mind the great geniuses of debate. 
No wonder that when he sprang into the arena, the 
cry arose that a giant had taken the field. He passed 
into the front rank of debaters at the first bound. It 
was in support of Burke's motion for Economical Reform 
that he made his maiden effort; and though called upon 
suddenly to answer an adverse speaker, he arose and made, 
on the spur of the moment, a reply that took the whole 
House by surprise. A hundred eyes strove to trace in 
the features and manner of the young orator the old 
familiar lineaments of the sire who slept in Westminster. 
A hundred memories recalled the trumpet tones which 
had so often roused the chivalry of England to action. 
" It is not a chip of the old block," said Burke, " it is the 
. 11 



242 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

old block itself. 1 ' Barely, however, has a son so gifted 
been so unlike his father. While the elder Pitt was fiery 
and impetuous, hasty in his resolves, and moved by the 
suggestions of a vivid imagination, the younger was cold, 
formal, and statuesque, deficient in imagination, always 
logical and argumentative, and, if occasionally roused, so 
wary and circumspect, that Mr. Fox declared that '"in a 
twenty years' contest he had never once caught him trip- 
ping,''' and Mr. Windham declared that he could at any 
moment speak a king's speech off-hand. The one was 
rapid, electric, vehement; the other chaste, classic, persua- 
sive. The one awed into acquiescence; the other argued 
into conviction. Instead of the bold, brief, and pointed 
manner of expressing daring truths, sometimes by meta- 
phor and sometimes by antithesis, which characterized his 
father's burning appeals, the younger Pitt spoke what 
has been happily termed " a state-paper style.'' His sen- 
tences, which fell from him as easily as if he had been 
talking, were stately, flowing, and harmonious. — kept up 
throughout to the same level, — and set off by a fine voice 
and a dignified bearing; but, though the language was 
sonorous, pure, and clear, it lacked fire: his intonation 
was monotonous, and his gestures passionless: and the 
dullest reader of his speeches cannot but see that in the 
energy and picturesqueness of his brightest flashes Lord 
Chatham was as superior to William Pitt as William Pitt 
was superior to Chatham in logic and the knowledge of 
politics and finance. 

It has been justly said that it is only on rare occa- 
sions that the true orator of the House of Commons has 
to nerve himself for the heights of his art; his reputa- 
tion is more habitually fixed according to the strength 



POLITICAL ORATOKS — PITT. 243 

and facility with which he moves upon level ground. It 
was here that Pitt excelled all his rivals. " In the formal 
introduction of a question, in the perspicuity of expla- 
nation in detail, in short and apt rejoinder in business- 
like debate, no man was so delightful to listen to; the 
decorum of his bearing, the fluency of his diction, the 
exquisite lucidity of his utterance, must have been a re- 
lief to Fox's preliminary stutter, shrill key-note, lifted 
fist, and redundant action, — to Burke's Irish brogue and 
episodical discursions." Of sarcasm he was a consummate 
master; probably no speaker ever wielded that weapon 
with more dexterity and force. The chief secret, however, 
of his weight and influence in the House was his uniform 
earnestness, — the feeling of all who listened to him that 
he always spoke from conviction, never from love of dis- 
play or for mere " effect." Unlike one of his successors 
at the present day, "the exquisite Hebrew juggler," who 
never seems more than a clever and gentlemanly actor, 
even when most animated, and who apparently could 
transfer " the cold glitter of his rhetoric," with little diffi- 
culty, to the advocacy of the cause he is attacking, Pitt's 
sincerity was never for a moment doubted. " He spoke," 
says Lord North, "like a born minister"; and if he failed 
in wit, playfulness, and the ornaments and graces of style, 
it was from prudence, not from penury, because he thought 
that "the spangles would little accord with the purple 
hem of his toga." As one who heard him declares: 
"The distinguishing excellence of his speaking corresponded 
to the distinguishing excellence of his whole mental sys- 
tem; every part of his speaking, in sentiment, in language, 
and in delivery, evidently bore, in our judgment, the 
stamp of his character, — all communicated to us a definite 



244 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

yet vivid appearance of the qualities of strenuousness 
without effort, unlabored intrepidity, and serene great- 
ness."* 



If the exhibition of deep feeling is the test of sincerity, 
and the appearance of sincerity the test of a great orator, 
one of the greatest orators that ever lived was Charles 
James Fox. The hurried sentence, the involuntary excla- 
mation, the vehement gesture, the sudden start, the agita- 
tion, — every peculiarity of his manner, — indicated an 
eloquence that came from the very depths of the soul. 
Loose in his arrangement, — neither polished nor exact in 
his style, — often hesitating and stammering at the start, 
he exercised a prodigious influence on his hearers, be- 
cause, as Sir James Mackintosh says, " he forgot himself 
and everything around him." He was but little more 
than a boy in years, when, in flagrant violation of the 
rules, he entered the House of Commons, and found him- 
self at the age of nineteen one of the legislators of the 
British Empire. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he had 
shown a taste for mathematics, and especially for the 
classics, which he read with critical accuracy, and had also 
acquired a rare mastery of the French language. While 
at these seats of learning, he is said to have astonished 
his masters as much by the levity of his conduct as by 
the quickness and brilliancy of his talents, while he al- 
ready exerted over his school-fellows the fascination which 
he exerted in after years over his fellow men. Devoting 
himself with equal earnestness to pleasure and to study, 
he wasted the night in dissipation, and then applied him- 
self fiercely to his books, spending upon them not less 

* Quarterly Review, August 1810. 



POLITICAL ORATORS — FOX. 245 

than nine or ten hours a day. The fruits of this appli- 
cation were seen in the passionate love which he manifested 
all his life for the great authors of antiquity, whose society 
he sought in the intervals of the fiercest political conflicts, 
and whose inspiration, no doubt, often directed the thun- 
ders of eloquence with which he shook the House of 
Commons. 

Unfortunately he had early acquired a passion for gam- 
ing, which became at last so intense, that, being asked what 
was the greatest happiness in life, he replied, " To play and 
to win 1 '; and to the question what was the next greatest, 
he replied, " To play, and to lose." It was during a visit 
to Spa, when he was hardly fifteen years of age, that he 
was first drawn into the vortex of play, and it is said that 
Lord Holland, his father, instead of checking, encouraged 
this fatal passion by allowing him five guineas a night to 
waste on the amusement. On leaving Oxford, he made 
a tour on the Continent, where he contracted vast debts in 
every capital, his liabilities at Naples alone amounting to 
£16,000. The purchase of annuities which he had granted 
to cover his losses at play, cost Lord Holland, it is said, 
more that £140,000. When Fox's prodigality compelled 
his father to summon him home, " his chapeau bras, red- 
heeled shoes, blue hair-powder," and fashionable airs, 
showed, we are told, that he had become one of the most 
egregious coxcombs in Europe. As an offset to this dissi- 
pation, he had acquired a keen relish for Italian literature, 
which prompted him to write in a letter to a friend: " For 
God's sake, learn Italian as fast as you can, if it be only 
to read Ariosto! There is more good poetry in Italian 
than in all other languages that I understand put to- 
gether." In his youth Fox was also passionately fond of 



246 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

private theatricals, where he distinguished himself both 
in tragedy and high comedy; and it is supposed by some 
writers that these experiences were useful to him, not only 
in helping him to modulate his voice, but also in enabling 
him early in life to conquer the terrible impediment to 
oratory which is known as " stage-fright." 

Few orators who have attained to equal eminence have 
been endowed by nature with so few of the physical gifts 
of the great orator. It is true that he had in the highest 
degree the oratorical temperament, and, as Bulwer has 
remarked, in the union of natural passion with scholastic 
reasoning excelled all others who have dignified the British 
senate. " His feeling," said Coleridge, " was all intellect, 
and his intellect all feeling. 11 But he had none of the 
beauty of person which enabled Bolingbroke to please 
without an effort, nor did his speech have any of that 
melody with which Chatham charmed an assembly. He 
spoke always as if he was in a passion; his gesticulation 
was extravagant and graceless ; his whole manner ungainly ; 
his voice husky; and his articulation, in spite of all his 
efforts to improve it, so indistinct as to be at times unin- 
telligible. When about to begin a speech, he advanced 
slowly, with a heavy, lumbering air, to the table, and 
began fumbling awkwardly with his fingers in a way 
which, — with his general coarseness of appearance, his 
careless, half-buttoned vest, his crumpled linen, his almost 
slovenly attire, — provoked, in one who heard him for the 
first time, a feeling of disappointment. But this very 
awkwardness of manner, — his entangled, broken sentences, 
the choking of his voice, and the scream with which he 
delivered his vehement passages, — only deepened the in- 
terest with which he was listened to, because they were 



POLITICAL ORATORS — FOX. 247 

regarded as proofs of his absolute sincerity. Moreover, 
these defects gave to the merits which redeemed them the 
thrilling suddenness of surprise, and so he was " patiently 
allowed to splutter and stammer out his way into the heart 
of his subject, grappling, as it were, with the ideas that 
embarrassed his choice by the pressure of their throng, till, 
once selected and marshalled into order, they emerged from 
the wildness of a tumult into the discipline of an army." 

As he gradually warmed with his theme, his declama- 
tion flowed from him in a torrent. " Every sentence," 
says Grattan, " came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, 
three thousand miles long." At times his tongue faltered, 
his voice grew stifled, and his face was bathed in tears. 
But though his words escaped from him, rather than were 
spoken, they were the vehicle of close and often of subtle 
and unanswerable argument. Argument, which was his 
passion in public and in private, upon the greatest and the 
pettiest themes, was his strongest point. It was for this 
reason, perhaps, and because of his fervid, rapid, copious 
manner, that Sir James Mackintosh called him the most 
Demosthenic orator since Demosthenes. Unlike the great 
orator of Greece, who carefully chose and collocated his 
words, and never wasted an epithet, he was careless and 
slovenly in his style; he abounded in repetitions, too, 
while the Greek " never came back upon a ground which 
he had utterly wasted and withered up by the tide of 
fire he had rolled over it." Beginning his career with 
the determination to excel in this department of public 
speaking, Fox was indefatigable in his efforts to perfect 
himself, till he rose at last, as Burke said, to be the most 
brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw. 
" During five whole sessions," he used to say, " I spoke 



248 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

every night but one; and I regret that I did not speak 
on that night, too." Like every other great orator, he 
attained his skill, in part, at the expense of those who 
heard him. 

His power as an orator is the more wonderful when 
we consider his habits of life. He rose late, and before 
he had quitted his bedroom, was surrounded by a circle 
of witty and accomplished disciples, with whom he dis- 
cussed the questions of the hour. Wrapped in a " foul 
linen night-gown " that only partially concealed his black 
and " bristly person," his hair matted, and his hands un- 
washed, he marshalled the forces of the opposition, and 
devised the tactics of the campaign. The day he spent at 
the Newmarket races; in the evening he assailed the min- 
ister; the night was consumed at Almack's, where the 
youthful aristocracy of England scattered, with a cast of 
the dice, the hoarded savings of centuries. Only the most 
vigorous and elastic constitution could have stood such an 
incessant drain of its energies; yet Fox, who was ten years 
older than Pitt, outlived him nearly eight months. When 
Fox was but twenty-two years old, Horace Walpole, who 
had been to hear him in the House of Commons, spoke 
of him as " the meteor of those days." " Fox's abilities," 
he adds, " are amazing at so very early a period, espe- 
cially under the circumstances of such a dissolute life. 
He was just arrived from Newmarket, and had sat up 
drinking all night, and had not been in bed. How such 
talents make one laugh at Tully's rules for an orator, 
and his indefatigable application ! His labored orations 
are puerile in comparison to this boy's manly reason." 
Again, at a later day, he exclaims: " What a man Fox is! 
After his long and exhausting speech on Hastings's trial, 



POLITICAL ORATORS — FOX. 249 

he was seen handing the ladies into their coaches with all 
the gayety and prattle of an idle gallant." * 

Though an accomplished scholar and well-grounded in 
history, Fox had little philosophical or economical knowl- 
edge. Adam Smith's great work he never troubled him- 
self to read, and Montesquieu's " Spirit of the Laws " he 
deemed full of nonsense. His understanding was power- 
ful and sagacious rather than acute and subtle, better 
fitted for appreciating the actual than for examining the 
abstract and speculative. One of his most valuable gifts 
was his quick, instinctive perception of an adversary's 
weakness, and the advantage to be taken of it, — an ad- 
vantage which, according to a modern orator, is, in the 
war of words, what the coup d'oeil of a practised general 
is in the field. Hence he was always happiest in reply; 
and if interrupted by cries of " order," pressed home his 
arguments with increasing vehemence till the redoubled 
blows and repeated bursts of extemporaneous declamation 
almost overpowered the audience, while they effectually 
checked all further interruption. It has been justly said 
that in his climaxes he was especially happy; argument 
was piled upon argument until it seemed as though the 
whole must fall by its own weight. But there was no 
danger of that; for if the burden was a gigantic one, 
there was a giant to bear it. In nothing is his prodig- 
ious power as a debater more strikingly shown than in 
the fact, that, after having stated the argument of his 
adversary with tenfold more force than his adversary him- 

* Fox's delightful social qualities, his sunny humor, sweetness of temper, 
and forgiving disposition, which endeared him to his associates, are well known. 
To a French abbe, who expressed his surprise that a country so moral as Eng- 
land could submit to be governed by a man so wanting in private character as 
Fox, Pitt replied: "Cest que vous rCavez pas ete sous la baguette du magicien, — 
(It is because you have not been under the wand of the magician). 1 ' 



250 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

self had put it, so that his friends were alarmed lest 
he should fail to answer it, he proceeded to rend it in 
pieces, thus making the contrast between it and its de- 
struction only the more vivid. Another of his peculiari- 
ties was the consummate skill with which he turned an 
attack into a defense, — often, it has been said, turning 
the very words of his adversaries, like captured artillery, 
upon themselves. Hardly less surprising was his wit, — 
the wit which holds up to ridicule the absurdities, incon- 
sistences, or weak points of an opponent's argument, — 
which he had in a rare degree. Both Pitt and Canning 
pronounced him the wittiest speaker of his times. Fox 
had not the teeming knowledge, the broad-sweeping views, 
the marvellous forecast, the prophetic vision, of Burke; 
but he surpassed him as an orator, because he had more 
tact, and kept to the topics of the hour. His were not 
the grand strategic movements of which few have the pa- 
tience to await the issue. They were close, hand-to-hand 
fights with the adversaries in his front; and hence the 
reason why his speeches, which were so impressive and 
even irresistible when delivered, are comparatively so cold 
and lifeless now. 

An English writer has thus vividly contrasted the 
styles of the two orators we have last described: "Pitt's 
style was stately, sonorous, full to abundance, smooth, and 
regular in its flow: Fox's, free to carelessness, rapid, rush- 
ing, turbid, broken, but overwhelming in its swell. Pitt 
never sank below his ordinary level, never paused in his 
declamation, never hesitated for a word; if interrupted 
by a remark or incident, he disposed of it parenthetically, 
and held on the even and lofty tenor of his way. Fox 
was desultory and ineffective till he warmed; he did best 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CANNING. 251 

when he was provoked or excited; he required the kind- 
ling impulse, the explosive spark; or he might be com- 
pared to the rock in Horeb before it was struck. . . . 
Passionately enamored of life, — loving pleasure intensely, 
and quitting it with difficulty and regret, — wanting, indeed, 
in the patient courage, foresight, and energy of the dis- 
ciplined intellect, but wielding with matchless skill a 
burning eloquence, searchingly argumentative even when 
most impetuous, — to us he recalls the simple and coura- 
geous tribune of a degraded populace, — the old orator, 
who could weep for very shame that they will not be 
stirred, as high above the crowd he thunders against the 
insolent dictator, and casts down his fiery words, like hail- 
stones, upon the upturned faces of the people! . . . 

" They spent their lives together, and in death they 
were not divided. Pitt died, — of old age, — at forty-six; 
a few months elapsed, and Fox was laid by his side. The 
noble lament in Marmion was uttered over the tomb 
where rest the ashes of both the rivals: 

1 Now is the stately column broke, 
The beacon light is quenched in smoke, 
The trumpet's silver sound is still. 
The warder silent on the hill! ' " 

Among the eminent British orators of this century, 
George Canning stands, undoubtedly, in the front rank. 
Few public speakers have begun their careers with so 
many of the outward advantages of an orator. His pres- 
ence, in spite of a somewhat slight and wiry figure, was 
remarkably prepossessing. He had a highly intellectual 
countenance, and his features, finely cut and decisive, 
were capable of a subtle play and variety of expression, 
which were admirably adapted to the changes of his elo- 



252 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

quence. "There is a lighting up of his features and a 
comic play about the mouth, 1 ' said Wilberforce, " when the 
full force of the approaching witticism strikes his own 
mind, which prepares you for the burst which is to follow." 
His voice was not loud, but flexible, and so clear and 
perfectly modulated that it was heard distinctly in every 
part of the House. Like Fox, Pulteney, and most of the 
other great parliamentary orators, he did not leap by a 
few bounds to the front rank, but mastered the art of 
speaking slowly and by persevering effort. His first 
speech, made in 1794 on a subsidy to the King of Sar- 
dinia, was a comparative failure. It was brilliant but 
cold, and also too refined in argument, and too method- 
ical in statement. His next speech was better, but was 
disfigured by a classical pedantry in the style, which, 
with other defects, led him, by the advice of Mr. Pitt, to 
keep silent for three years, in order to correct his faults 
and allow them to be forgotten. 

Since the days of Chatham a great change had taken 
place in the style of speaking in the House of Commons. 
Formerly the discussions had turned largely upon personal- 
ities and abstract sentiments, and were compared by Burke 
to the loose speeches of a vestry meeting or a debating 
club. In the time of Pitt and Fox a greater knowledge 
of the minutiae of a question was demanded, and a still 
greater in the time of Brougham and Canning. By dint 
of continual labor and unsparing self-correction, Canning 
gradually reached the perfection of his own style, the dis- 
tinguishing qualities of which were rapidity, polish, and 
ornament. It was this peculiar polish, accompanied by a 
studied, though apparently natural rapidity, which, accord- 
ing to a good judge, becoming more and more perfect as 



POLITICAL ORATOKS — CANNING. 258 

it became apparently more natural, subsequently formed 
the essential excellence of his speaking. ; ' Quick, easy, 
and fluent, . . . now brilliant and ornamental, then again 
light and playful, or, if he wished it, clear, simple, and 
incisive, no speaker ever combined a greater variety of 
qualities, though many have been superior in each of the 
excellences which he possessed." Rarely passionate, when 
he did manifest deep feeling, the effect was electrical. The 
vehemence was the more striking from the contrast it pre- 
sented to his ordinarily passionless demeanor, his sarcastic 
temper, and his habitual reserve. > 

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that he was weakest, 
on the whole, in his declamatory passages, which are too 
often wanting in that robustness and power, that grandeur 
and magnificence, which thrill through the mind. He did 
not, like Fox, dart fire into his audience, or sweep them 
along on the torrent of an impetuous and resistless elo- 
quence. He had none of those burning lava-streams with 
which Brougham scorches and destroys whatever crosses 
his path. His discourse flows on like the waters of some 
calm, majestic river unruffled by the wind; we hear noth- 
ing of the dash of the torrent, or the roar of the cataract; 
there are few of the startling apostrophes or soul-stirring 
appeals which sometimes bring an audience to their feet as 
one man. Having no very deep convictions, none of the 
stuff of which martyrs and bigots are made, he seldom 
forgets himself in his subject. He was constitutionally 
too fastidious, he had too great a horror of excess in every 
form, to indulge often in fiery declamation. There is no 
doubt, too, that, till the latter part of his life, the effect 
of his speeches was lessened by the elaboration, — the ex- 
cessive finish, — which they betrayed. His severe and 



254 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

dainty taste, the extreme care with which he lingered 
over the rhythmus of a sentence, or even the choice of an 
epithet, — sometimes degenerated into prudery. It is said 
that, as minister, he would scan a royal speech till the 
faintest tinge of color was bleached out of it. If at the 
eleventh hour it was found to contain a slight grammatical 
error, he would not present it to the House until the error 
had been removed. 

Sir James Mackintosh pronounces him " the best model, 
among our orators, of the adorned style 1 '; yet it is evident 
that he sometimes over-ornamented his speeches, for the 
same critic admits that Mr. Canning's hearers were often 
so dazzled by the splendor of his diction that they did not 
perceive the acuteness of his reasoning. They were too 
often confused, also, by the cross-lights which his wit, of 
which there was always a superabundance, shot over the 
canvas. As he advanced in years, however, his taste 
became more and more severe, till even the most micro- 
scopic critic of his speeches found few specks to dim their 
beauty. When he had time to prepare, not a shot miscar- 
ried, not an argument was weakened by a needless phrase. 
The arrow, stripped of all plumage except that which aided 
and steadied its flight, struck within a hair's breadth of the 
archer's aim. Whether it pierced the joints of his oppo- 
nent's harness, or shivered on the shield, might be, some- 
times, a question; but that it often wounded deeply, is 
proved by the retaliation it provoked. 

What can be more happy than his allusion to Napo- 
leon after the battle of Leipsic and his retreat to Paris, 
when the first gleams of victory shone over the gloomy 
struggle of the Allies for twenty years? 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CANNING. 255 

"•How was their prospect changed! In those countries where, at most, a 
short struggle had been terminated by a result disastrous to their wishes, if not 
altogether closing in despair, they had now to contemplate a very different as- 
pect of affairs. Germany crouched no longer trembling at the feet of the tyrant, 
but maintained a balanced contest. The mighty deluge by which the Continent 
had been overwhelmed, is subsiding. The limits of the nations are again visible, 
and the spires and turrets of ancient establishments are beginning to reappear 
above the subsiding waves.'" 

It is rarely that so brilliant a speaker, one so fond of 
ornament, has such a fund of good sense. He was even 
familiar with the intricacies of finance, and in one of 
his speeches (that on the bullion question) " played," says 
Horner, " with its most knotty subtleties." When the 
British government, in 1811, undertook to make it penal 
to buy gold at a premium, and a resolution was offered 
in the House of Commons declaring that the notes of 
the Bank of England had been, and then were, held in 
public estimation "to be equivalent to the legal coin of 
the realm, and generally accepted as such," Mr. Canning 
exposed the absurdity of the measure in the following 
terms, which have as much pertinency to certain Ameri- 
can financial schemes, as if uttered with direct reference 
to them: 

" When Galileo first promulgated the doctrine that the earth turned round 
the sun, and that the sun remained stationary in the centre of the universe, the 
holy fathers of the Inquisition took alarm at so daring an innovation, and forth- 
with declared the first of these propositions to be false and heretical, and the 
other to be erroneous in point of faith. The holy office pledged itself to believe 
that the earth was stationary, and the sun movable. But this pledge had little 
effect in changing the natural course of things; the sun and the earth continued, 
in spite of it, to preserve their accustomed relations to each other, just as the 
coin and the bank-note will, in spite of the right honorable gentleman's resolu- 
tion.' 1 

Another rare merit which Canning finally possessed 
was that of seizing and giving expression to the general 
sense of the assembly he addressed. Often, before rising 
to speak, he would make a lounging tour of the House, 
listening to the observations which the previous speeches 



256 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

had excited, so that at last, when he himself spoke, he 
seemed to many of his hearers to be merely giving a 
striking and impressive utterance to their own thoughts. 

The one weapon of which he was most master was wit.. 
"His irony," it is said, "was swift and stealthy, — it stabbed 
like a stiletto." Unfortunately, he was only too willing 
to use it, and as to this was added a somewhat haughty 
manner, and an apparent indifference to the feelings of 
those whom he ridiculed, it is no wonder that he often 
exasperated when he should have sought onlj r to convince. 
During the first ten years of his parliamentary career, 
he never made a speech on which he particularly plumed 
himself, without likewise making an enemy for life. A 
comic alliteration, — a ludicrous combination of words, — 
occurring to him, was a temptation he could not resist. 
The alliterative phrase, " revered and ruptured," applied 
to an unfortunate person, made Canning more unpopular 
than the worst acts of his Administration. His sneering de- 
scription, in 1812, of the American navy as " half-a-dozen 
fir frigates, with bits of bunting flying at their heads," 
exasperated the American people more than the impress- 
ment of their seamen. As Sir Henry Bulwer says: "He 
was always young. The head of the sixth form at Eton — 
squibbing 'the doctor.' as Mr. Addington was called; .fight- 
ing with Lord Castlereagh; cutting jokes on Lord Nugent; 
flatly contradicting Lord Brougham; swaggering over the 
Holy Alliance ; he was in perpetual personal quarrels, — one 
of the reasons which created for him so much personal 
interest during the whole of his parliamentary career." 

One of the best specimens of Mr. Canning's wit is his 
celebrated sketch of Lord Nugent who went out to join 
the Spanish patriots when their cause was nearly lost; 



POLITICAL ORATOKS — CANNING. 257 



" It was about the middle of last July that the heavy Falmouth coach was 
observed traveling to its destination through the roads of Cornwall, with more 
than its wonted gravity. The coach contained two inside passengers,— the 
one a fair lady of no inconsiderable dimensions, the other a gentleman who 
was conveying the succor of his person to the struggling patriots of Spain.* 
I am further informed,-^ and this interesting fact, sir, can also be authenti- 
cated,— that the heavy Falmouth van, (which, honorable gentlemen, doubtless, 
are aware is constructed for the conveyance of cumbrous articles,) was laden, 
upon the same memorable occasion, with' a box- of most portentous magni- 
tude. Now, sir, whether this box, like the flying chest of the conjurer, pos- 
sessed any supernatural properties of locomotion, is a point which I confess 
I am quite unable to determine; but of this I am most credibly informed,— 
and I should hesitate long before I stated it to the House, if the statement 
did not rest upon the most unquestionable authority,— that this extraordinary 
box contained a full uniform of a Spanish general of cavalry, together with 
a helmet of the most curious workmanship; a helmet, allow me to add, 
scarcely inferior in size to the celebrated helmet in the castle of Otranto. 
Though the idea of going to the relief of a fortress, blockaded by sea and 
besieged by land, in a full suit of light horseman's equipments was, perhaps, 
not strongly consonant to modern military operations, yet when the gentle- 
man and his box made their appearance, the Cortes, no doubt, were over- 
whelmed with joy, and rubbed their hands with delight at the approach of 
the long promised aid. How the noble Lord was received, or what effects he 
operated on the councils of the Cortes by his arrival, I do not know. Things 
were at that juncture moving rapidly to their final issue; and how far the 
noble lord conduced to the termination by throwing his weight into the sink- 
ing scale of the Cortes, is too nice a question for me just now to settle. 11 

The finest passage, perhaps, in all Mr. Canning's speeches 
is his beautiful picture of the ships in ordinary at Ply- 
mouth, as an emblem of England - reposing in the qui- 
etude of peace. The speech in which it occurs was deliv- 
ered at Plymouth in 1823, after he had inspected the 
docks : 

" Our present repose is no more a proof of our inability to act than the 
state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen those mighty masses 
that float in the waters above your town is a proof that they are devoid of 
strength or incapable of being fitted for action. You well know, gentlemen, 
how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows in 
perfect stillness — how soon, upon any call of patriotism or of necessity, it 
would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and mo- 
tion—how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage —how quickly 
it would put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements 
of strength, and awake its dormant thunders. Such as is one of those mag- 

* Lord Nugent was a remarkably large, heavy man, with a head too large 
in proportion to his body. 
11* 



258 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 



niflcent machines when springing from inaction into a display of its strength, 
such is England herself, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently 
causes her power to be put forth on an adequate occasion.'" 



It is said that when Paganini was asked who was the 
first violinist of Europe, he replied: "I do not know; 
Labinsky is second." Lord Brougham is said to have 
made a similar evasive reply when asked whom he con- 
sidered the greatest orator in England. If not the Cory- 
phaeus among the great orators of the present century, 
he stands, beyond all dispute, in the very front rank. 
He appears early to have adopted Demosthenes as his 
model; and in one quality he resembles the Greek orator 
whose speech he has translated, and some of whose pas- 
sages he has imitated. We refer to his energy, the 
dsivdrrjq of the Greeks. Endowed with a tough, lignum- 
vitse frame, he had a mental organism equally robust; 
and his oratorical style is the natural outcome of his 
physical and mental constitution. It is not the exercitatio 
domestica et umbratilis, the silvery eloquence which is nice 
and dainty in its choice of words, and which appeals to 
the reason rather than to the feelings, but that impetuous 
oratory which rushes medium in agmen, in pulverem, in 
clamorem, in castra, atque in aciem forensem. There is 
in it a freshness and energy, a rushing force, a declama- 
tory vehemence, which reminds one of the roar of the 
cataract or the dash of the torrent. In its most fiery 
passages, it comes down with a sustained and tremendous 
impetuosity, like a bombardment with red-hot shot from 
a whole park of artillery. His speeches have been called 
" law papers on fire." If the highest strength is to be 
found in repose, it does not belong to Brougham. Every 
word, look, and gesture indicate a restless, impatient en- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BROUGHAM. 259 

ergy. Martin Luther said that the reason why his com- 
position was so boisterous and tempestuous, was, that 
he was "born to fight with devils and storms"; and 
Brougham might have made a similar explanation. Of 
ease and quiet he has apparently no conception. 

Occasionally his vehemence of tone amounts almost 
to a scream. One seems to hear rough and thick hail 
falling and rattling on the roof as he listens to his sen- 
tences, — 

"Tam multa in tectis crepitans salit horrida grando 1 '; 

and the effect upon the nerves is far from pleasant. There 
is at times a monotony of declamation which is suggestive 
of the beating of a gong, or an oratorical machine; a 
fault which led an old English judge, who loved dawdling, 
and hated the " discomposing qualities " of Brougham's 
oratory, to call him the Harangue. " Well, gentlemen, 
what did the Harangue say next? Why, it said this (mis- 
stating it) ; but here, gentlemen, the Harangue was wrong, 
and not intelligible." But though Brougham has plenty 
of faults, they are the faults, not of weakness, but of 
power. He runs riot in the exuberance of his strength. 
His sentences are interminable in their length, stuffed 
with parentheses, and as full of folds as a sleeping boa- 
constrictor. He is fond of repetition and exaggeration, 
clothes his ideas in almost endless forms of words; crowds 
qualifying clauses, explanatory statements, hints, insinua- 
tions, and even distinct thoughts, into a single sentence; 
piles Ossa upon Pelion; accumulates image upon image, 
metaphor upon metaphor, argument upon argument, till 
the hearer, perplexed by the multiplicity of ideas, almost 
loses the thread of the reasoning, and is lost in the laby- 
rinth of his periods. Occasionally, also, he is too theatrical 



260 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

for good taste, as when at the close of his great speech in 
the House of Lords on Parliamentary Reform, sinking on 
the floor beside the woolsack, he exclaimed: "By all you 
hold most dear, — by all the ties that bind every one of us 
to our common order and our common country, I solemnly 
adjure you, — I warn you, — I implore you, — yea, on my 
bended knees, I supplicate } r ou, — reject not this bill." Pas- 
sages like these, which are better adapted to Southern than 
to Northern latitudes, are apt to provoke a sarcasm from 
the cold-blooded Briton like that of Sheridan when Burke 
threw down a dagger on the floor of the House of Com- 
mons: "The gentleman has brought us the knife, but 
where is the fork?" 

Again, Brougham has too great a love for big " diction* 
ary words." He seems either to have no taste for simple, 
Saxon English, or to know little of its force. His style is 
essentially a spoken style, — better to hear than to read; 
and all who have heard him agree that, without hearing 
him, it was impossible to obtain any but a dim concep- 
tion of his power. This disadvantage he shares with some 
of the greatest orators, — notably with Demosthenes, Chat- 
ham, and Fox. In spite of all drawbacks, however, we feel 
even in reading his printed speeches, that their effects must 
have been prodigious, especially when we remember his 
extraordinary elocution, and that his object was not to 
please, but to strike hard, to carry the object in hand, to 
hit the nail on the head. It is in personal encounters, 
in close, hand-to-hand fights with a foe, that his power 
is most signally displayed. " For fierce, Vengeful, and ir- 
resistible assault," says John Foster, " Brougham stands 
the foremost man in all this world." When thus en- 
gaged, his dialectical skill, his quickness and keenness in 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BROUGHAM. 261 

exposing a fallacy or crushing a weak pretense, his gall- 
ing irony, his flaying sarcasm, his encyclopaedic knowledge, 
his rushing resistless declamation, his defiant courage, and 
his ability to wrest a weapon from the hands of an ad- 
versary and turn its edge upon himself, — appear to ter- 
rible advantage. Canning was the only member of the 
House who could match him on such an occasion, and 
some of the encounters which took place between these 
intellectual gladiators, — the Coeur de Lion and the Sala- 
din of the Senate, the one armed with a battle-axe, the 
other with the scimitar, — the one athletic and powerful, 
the other nimble, adroit, and a consummate master of fence, 
— were among the most exciting exhibitions of this kind 
ever witnessed in the British Parliament. 

In speaking of Brougham's attack, Professor Goodrich 
remarks that "it is usually carried on under the forms of 
logic. For the materials of his argument, he sometimes 
goes off to topics the most remote and apparently alien 
from his subject; but he never fails to come down upon 
it at last with overwhelming force. 1 ' He is a great mas- 
ter of irony and sarcasm. Though he has an abundance 
of wit, it never, like Canning's, takes the form of polished 
and sparkling pleasantry, but is steeped in scorn and con- 
tempt. Perhaps no orator ever lived whose invective 
was more terrible. The effects he produced were materi- 
ally increased by his looks and gestures, which were as 
unique and remarkable as his sentiments. As he ad- 
vanced in years, his face became like granite, deep in its 
lines, strong in its individuality, almost fierce in its power. 
The iron massiveness of his forehead, the long twitching 
nose, half-turned up and half square at its lower end, 
the high cheek bones, the large, restless mouth, full of 



262 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

character, the eye, quick and watchful as a hawk's, the 
saturnine swarthiness of his complexion, — arrested the 
attention of every observer. The impression made. by his 
oratory was the more remarkable, as he labored under 
the disadvantage of an unmusical voice. In its highest 
tones it was often harsh and hoarse, sounding, it is said, 
like the scream of the northern eagle swooping down 
upon its prey; but this was compensated in some degree 
by his skill in its management, modulating it, as he did, 
with admirable skill. 

A good specimen of Lord Brougham's manner is the 
close of his speech- on Law Reform, in 1828: 

"You saw the greatest warrior of the age,— conqueror of Italy — ^ humbler 
of Germany,— terror of the North,— saw him account all his matchless victo- 
ries poor compared with the triumph you are now in a condition to win, — saw 
him contemn the fickleness of fortune, while in despite of her he could pro- 
nounce his memorable boast : 1 1 shall go down to posterity with the Code in 
my hand!' You have vanquished him in the field: strive now to rival him in 
the sacred arts of peace ! Outstrip him as lawgiver whom in arms you over- 
came! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the more solid and en- 
during splendor of the Reign. It was the boast of Augustus.— it formed part 
of" the glare in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost, — that he 
found Rome of brick and left it of marble. But how much nobler will be 
the Sovereign's boast, when he shall have it to say, that he found law dear 
and left it cheap; found it a sealed book, left it a living letter; found it the 
patrimony of the rich, left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two- 
edged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield 
of innocence! " 

One of the chief merits of Brougham's oratory is its 
felicity in description. Having little imagination, — at 
least, in proportion to his other faculties, — he has no 
poetic passages, no meteoric images flashing across his 
page; his light is emphatically a "dry light"; but, so 
far as it goes, it is, as some one has said, like an Italian 
sky, in which towers, trees, temples, mountains, and stars, 
are defined to an almost unearthly sharpness. A striking 
example of his pictorial power is the passage in his speech 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BROUGHAM. 263 

on the Slave Trade, in 1838, when he described the horrors 
of the Middle Passage, and spoke of " the shark that fol- 
lows in the wake of the slave-ship," declaring that " her 
course is literally to be tracked through the ocean by the 
blood of the murdered, with which her enormous crime 
stains its waters/' Hardly less noteworthy is the invective 
against the policy of Mr. Pitt, in a speech in 1812, at the 
Liverpool election: 

lk Gentlemen, I stand up in this contest against the friends and followers of 
Mr. Pitt, or, as they partially designate him, 'the immortal statesman,' now no 
more. Immortal -in the miseries of his devoted country! Immortal in the 
wounds of her bleeding liberties ! Immortal in the cruel wars which sprang 
from his cold, calculating ambition! Immortal in the intolerable taxes, the 
countless loads of debt which these wars have flung upon us,— which the 
youngest man among us "will not live to see the end of! Immortal in the tri- 
umphs of our enemies, and the ruin of our allies, — the costly purchase of so 
much blood and treasure! Immortal in the afflictions of England, and the 
humiliations of her friends, through the whole results of his twenty years 1 
reign, from the first rays of favor with which a delighted court gilded his early 
apostasy, to the deadly glare which is at this instant cast upon his name by the 
burning metropolis of our last ally !* But may no such immortality ever fall to 
my lot,— let me rather live innocent and inglorious: and when at last I cease to 
serve you, and to feel for your wrongs, may I have a humble monument in some 
nameless stone, to tell that beneath it there rests from his labors in your service 
' an enemy of the immortal statesman,— a friend of peace and of the peoples " 

It is easy to imagine the electrical effect of such declama- 
tion as the following, which breathes defiance in every 
word. It is from his speech in the House of Lords in 
1838, on the emancipation of Negro apprentices: 

" 1 have read with astonishment, and I repel with scorn, the insinuation that 
I had acted the part of an advocate, and that some of my statements were col- 
ored to serve a cause. How dares any man so to accuse me? How dares any 
one, skulking under a fictitious name, to launch his slanderous imputations from 
his covert? I come forward in my own person. I make the charge in the face 
of day. I drag the criminal to trial. I openly call down justice on his head. I 
defy his attacks. I defy his defenders. I challenge investigation. How dares 
any concealed adversary to charge me as an advocate speaking from a brief, and 
misrepresenting the facts to serve a purpose? But the absurdity of this charge 
even outstrips its malice. 1 ' 

* The news of the burning of Moscow had reached Liverpool that very day. 



264 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

The following passage from the peroration of a speech 
in the House of Commons, in 1830, on Negro Slavery, 
will recall to the reader the memorable burst of eloquence 
by Curran on a similar theme: 

" Tell me not of rights.— talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. 
I deny the right — I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings 
of our common nature, rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the 
understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain 
you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim ! There is a law above all the 
enactments of human codes.— the same throughout the world, the same in all 
times,— such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night 
of ages, and opened to one world the sources of power, wealth, and knowledge ; 
to another all unutterable woes; such it is at this day. It is the law written in 
the heart of man by the finger of his Maker; and by that law, unchangeable and 
eternal, while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they will 
reject the wild and guilty phantasy that man can hold property in man ! In vain 
you appeal to treaties, to covenants between nations: the covenants of the 
Almighty, whether of the old covenant or the new, denounce such unholy pre- 
tensions '" 

That there is a dash of charlataniy in many of Broug- 
ham's displays, is doubtless true, as it is true of all such 
monsters of power; but as an advocate, he has, in his 
peculiar line, very few superiors. For a time it was a 
fashion with men who could not conceive of the possibility 
of excellence in more than one department of knowledge, 
to sneer at him as "no lawyer"; but the fact that, in spite 
of his swift dispatch of business, hardly one of his chan- 
cery decisions was reversed on appeal to the House of 
Lords, shows that his place in the most jealous and ex- 
acting of professions was fairly won. Less versed than 
many of his rivals in the technicalities of his craft, yet 
in quick, keen insight into the bearings of a cause, in in- 
domitable pluck in the most adverse circumstances, in 
promptness in meeting a sudden emergency, in the skil- 
ful worming out of latent facts, in impromptu adroitness 
in veiling defective evidence with rhetorical drapery, in 
sarcastic ironv and "damnable iteration" of invective 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BROUGHAM. 265 

when required against a witness or a prosecutor, he was 
unsurpassed. His speech in defense of Queen Caroline, 
in the House of Lords, is admitted, with all its faults, to 
have been a masterpiece of dialectical and rhetorical skill. 
The rank and sex of his client, the malignant and brutal 
tyranny of her husband, George IV, the intense interest 
felt by the nation in the result, the exalted character of 
the tribunal, the great array of hostile talent, learning and 
eloquence, — all conspired, on this occasion, to call forth 
all the advocate's powers. We can give no analysis or 
extracts from this great speech, the most striking pas- 
sages of which are familiar to all students of modern 
forensic eloquence. The power with which the evidence 
for the bill was shattered; the skill with which the testi- 
mony of Majocchi, the non mi ricordo Majocchi, — of De- 
mont, " the Machiavel of waiting-maids," and of Cucchi, 
with " that unmatched physiognomy, those gloating eyes, 
that sniffing nose, that lecherous mouth, 1 ' — was probed, 
dissected, and destroyed; the defiant courage with which he 
pronounced the King " the ringleader of the band of per- 
jured witnesses," — have never been surpassed, if matched, 
in modern forensic oratory. Hardly inferior, perhaps fully 
equal, to the last-mentioned oratorical effort, was that 
made by Brougham in defense of Ambrose Williams. When 
Queen Caroline died in August, 1821, the bells in nearly 
all the churches of England were tolled in respect to her 
memory, those of Durham only remaining silent. Upon 
this silence, Mr. Williams, the editor of a newspaper at 
Durham, commented with some severity, and was there- 
upon indicted for a libel against " the clergy residing in 
and near the city of Durham." The pith of the libel 
was contained in the following passages: 
12 



266 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

"In this Episcopal city, containing six churches independently of the 
cathedra], not a single bell announced the departure of the magnanimous 
spirit of the most injured of Queens, the most persecuted of women. Thus 
the brutal enmity of those who embittered her mortal existence pursues her 
in her shroud. . . . We know not whether any actual orders were issued to 
prevent this customary sign of mourning: but the omission plainly indicates 
the kind of spirit which predominates among our clergy. Yet these men pro- 
fess to be followers of Jesus Christ, to walk in his footsteps, to teach his pre- 
cepts, to inculcate his spirit, to promote harmony, charity, and Christian love ! 
Out upon such hypocrisy ! " 

The prosecution was conducted by Mr. Scarlett, who, 
in his opening speech contended that the silence of the 
bells might have been intended as a mark of respect, — 
that the clergy were not so loud in their grief as others, 
because, perhaps, they were more sincere, and sympathized 
too deeply with the Queen's' fate to give an open expres- 
sion to their sorrow. Brougham, who led the defense, 
saw at once the fearful blunder, and ,; pounced upon it as 
the falcon pounces upon its prey'': 

" That you may understand the meaning of this passage, it is necessary for 
me to set before you the picture my learned friend was pleased to draw of 
the clergy of the diocese of Durham, and I shall recall it to your minds almost 
in his own words. According to him they stand in a peculiarly unfortunate sit- 
uation; they are, in truth, the most injured of men. The}' all. it seems, enter- 
tained the same generous sentiments with the rest of their countrymen, though 
they did not express them in the old, free. English manner, by openly con- 
demning the proceedings against the late Queen: and after her glorious but 
unhappy life had closed, the venerable the dergy of Durham. I am now told for 
the first time, though less forward in giving vent to their feelings than the 
rest of their fellow-citizens, though not vehement in their indignation at the 
matchless and unmanly persecution of the Queen, though not so unbridled in 
their joy at her immortal triumph, nor so loud in their lamentations over her 
mournful and untimely end, did, nevertheless, in reality, all the while, deeply 
sympathize in her sufferings, in the bottom of their reverend hearts ! 

When all the resources of the most ingenious cruelty hurried her to a fate 
without parallel, if not so clamorous, they did not feel the least of all the 
members of the community: their grief was in truth too deep for utterance, 
sorrow clung round their bosoms, weighed upon their tongues, stifled every 
sound; and when all the rest of mankind, of all sects and of all nations, freely 
gave vent to the feelings of our common nature, their silence, the contrast 
which they displayed to the rest of their species, proceeded from the greater 
depth of their affliction ; they said the less because they felt the more ! Oh ! 
talk of hypocrisy after this ! Most consummate of all the hypocrites ! After 
instructing your chosen, official advocate to stand forward with such a defence — 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BROUGHAM. 267 

such an exposition of your motives — to dare utter the word hypocrisy, and 
complain of those who charged you with it ! This is indeed to insult com- 
mon sense, and outrage the feelings of the whole human race ! If you were 
hypocrites hefore, you were downright, frank, honest hypocrites to what you 
have now made yourselves, and surely, for all you have ever done, or ever 
been charged with, your worst enemies must be satiated with the humiliation 
of this day, its just atonement, and ample retribution! '■' 

In his opening speech Mr. Scarlett had expressed his 
regret that the clergy had .not the power of defending 
themselves through the public press. To this Brougham 
replied that they had, in fact, largely used it, and " scur- 
rilously and foully libelled" the defendant: . 

" Not that they wound deeply or injure much; but that is no fault of theirs: 
without hurting, they give trouble and discomfort. The insect brought into life 
by corruption, and nestled in filth, though its flight-be lowly and its sting puny, 
can swarm and buzz and irritate the skin and offend the nostril, and altogether 
give us nearly as much annoyance as the wasp, whose nobler nature it aspires to 
emulate. These reverend slanderers,— these pious backbiters,— devoid of force 
to wield the sword, snatch the dagger; and destitute of wit to point or to barb it, 
and make it rankle in the wound, steep it in venom to make it fester in the 
scratch." 

To give an adequate account of Brougham in a few 
passages is like trying to compress the Amazon into a 
tea-cup. In one session of Parliament he made two hun- 
dred and thirty speeches, of which he says in an epitaph 
which he wrote upon himself, 

". Here, reader, turn your weeping eyes, 
My fate a useful moral teaches; 
The hole in which my body lies, 

Would not contain one-half my speeches." 

In this, as in many other things, he was an exception to 
the ordinary and recognized laws of success; and, as one 
contemplates his marvellous and meteoric career, he is 
tempted, in spite of its brilliancy, — even in spite of his 
magnificent achievements in behalf of liberty, education, 
and charity, — to exclaim: tl Non equidem invideo, miror 
magis. 1 ' 



CHAPTEE X. 



POLITICAL ORATORS: IRISH. 



f^i REATER as a thinker than Chatham or Fox, but in- 
^-^ ferior as an orator, was Edmund Burke, who, in the 
variety and extent of his powers, surpassed every other ora- 
tor of ancient or modern times. He was what he called 
Charles Townshend, " a prodigy," and ranks not merely with 
the eloquent speakers of the world, but with the Bacons. 
Newtons, and Shakspeares. His speeches and pamphlets 
are saturated with thought ; they absolutely swarm, like 
an ant-hill, with ideas, and, in their teeming profusion, 
remind one of the " myriad - minded " author of Hamlet. 
To the broadest sweep of intellect, he added the most 
surprising subtlety, and his almost oriental imagination 
was fed by a vast and varied knowledge, — the stores of 
a memory that held everything in its grasp. The only 
man who, according to Adam Smith, at once compre- 
hended the total revolution the latter proposed in polit- 
ical economy, he was at the same time the best judge of 
a picture that Sir Joshua Reynolds ever knew; and while 
his knowledge was thus boundless, his vocabulary was as 
extensive as his knowledge. Probably no orator ever 
lived on whose lips language was more plastic and duc- 
tile. The materials of his style were gathered from the 
accumulated spoils of many tongues and of all ages; and 
it has been said that even the technicalities and appro- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BURKE. 269 

priated phraseology of almost all sciences and arts, pro- 
fessions and modes of life, were familiar to him, and 
were ready to express in the most emphatic manner the 
exhaustless metaphors which his imagination supplied from 
these sources. 

It is told among the miracles of Mahomet that he 
enabled his followers for days, not only to subsist, but 
to grow fat on the sticks and stones of the desert; and, 
in like manner, the imagination of Burke could find nutri- 
ment in statistics, — the veriest dry-bones of finance and 
fact. " It could busy itself with the fate of an empire, 
or with the condition of the king's kitchen. It brought 
before him the Catholic who groaned in the bogs of Tip- 
perary, and the African who rotted in the slave factories 
of Guinea. It entered the royal buttery, and in a moment 
the dry details of cooks and turnspits are wrought into 
a scene that might have provoked the envy of Sheridan." 
A burning enthusiasm for whatever object engaged his 
sympathies was one of his leading qualities; and hence 
vehemence, passionate earnestness, and declamatory energy 
are among the most salient qualities of his speeches. When 
his passions were asleep, he was one of the most sagacious 
of men; but when his prejudices were roused, he "took 
his position like a fanatic and defended it like a philoso- 
pher." His mind when thus excited has been compared 
to the Puritan regiments of Cromwell, which moved to 
battle with the precision of machines, while burning with 
the fiercest ardor of fanaticism. 

Burke's speeches abound with examples of the most 
solid and brilliant eloquence, argumentative, emotional, 
and descriptive, while they also contain a greater number 
of illuminative ideas, — of pointed, poignant, and poetic 



270 ORATORY A^D ORATORS. 

sentences, — than those of any other orator. There is, 
indeed, hardly any species of oratorical excellence which 
may not be found in them in heaped profusion, and they 
needed only to have been less profound and reflective, 
and to have been delivered by a speaker with adequate 
physical gifts, to have produced a profound impression. 
Unfortunately for his influence as an orator, both his 
voice and his manner, his figure and his gesture, were 
against him. Tall, but not robust, awkward in gait and 
gesture; with an intellectual but severe countenance, that 
rarely relaxed into a smile; speaking a strong and rather 
ungainly Irish brogue: having a voice which was harsh 
when he was calm, and which, when he was excited, became 
often so hoarse as to be hardly intelligible; it is not won- 
derful that he failed to ravish his hearers, and was nick- 
named " The Dinner Bell " by men who had been spell- 
bound by the imposing figure, the eagle eye, and the pas- 
sionate oratoiy of Chatham. But the chief cause of their 
weariness was his mode of handling his subject. Instead 
of seizing, like Fox. on the strong points of a case, by 
throwing away intermediate thoughts and striking at the 
heart of his theme, he stopped to philosophize and to 
instruct his hearers, and, as Goldsmith says, 

"Went on refining, 
And thought of convincing while they thought of dining." 

Johnson tells us that his early speeches " filled the town 
with wonder"; but he adds that while none could deny 
that he spoke well, yet all granted that he spoke "too 
often and too long." 

Oratory, it has been justly said, like the drama, abhors 
lengthiness; it abhors, too, above all things, prolonged 
philosophical discussion. The passions to which it appeals 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BURKE. 271 

must be those which all men have most in common; the 
arguments which it addresses to the reason must be those 
which can be apprehended by men of plain sense as read- 
ily as by hair-splitting casuists or deep-thinking scholars. 
Even beauties themselves, if they distract the attention 
from the main theme, become blemishes. Burke, from the 
very depth of his understanding, demanded too great an 
intellectual effort on the part of his hearers; he exacted 
" too great a tension of faculties little exercised by men 
of the world in general, not to create fatigue in an assem- 
bly which men of the world composed." As an orator, he 
too often forgot the great objects of oratory, conviction and 
persuasion, and failed in two things which, it has been said, 
are given but to few, and when given, almost always pos- 
sessed alone, — fierce, nervous, overwhelming declamation, 
and close, rapid argument. " He can seldom confine him- 
self," says Henry Rogers, " to a simple business-like view 
of the subject under discussion, or to close, rapid, com- 
pressed argumentation on it. On the contrary, he makes 
boundless excursions into all the regions of moral and 
political philosophy; is perpetually tracing up particular 
instances and subordinate principles to profound and com- 
prehensive maxims; amplifying and expanding the most 
meagre materials into brief but comprehensive disserta- 
tions of political science, and incrusting (so to speak) the 
nucleus of the most insignificant fact with the most ex- 
quisite crystallizations of truth; while the whole composi- 
tion glitters and sparkles again with a rich profusion of 
moral reflections, equally beautiful and just." His speeches 
were, in fact, elaborate political lectures, delivered often 
with the air of a pedagogue teaching his pupils. He was 
what Clootz pretended to be, "the orator of the human 



272 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

race," and while he could harangue man eloquently, was 
unskilled in the art of addressing men. While he was 
expatiating on themes of eternal interest, his hearers were 
absorbed in the business of the hour, and had little sym- 
pathy with that broad and high political philosophy, out of 
which his masculine and thoughtful eloquence sprang like 
the British oak from the strong black mould of ages. So 
unsuited to the House of Commons was his method of 
expounding his views, that Erskine crept under the 
benches to escape a speech which, when published, he 
thumbed to rags; and Pitt and Grenville both decided it 
was not worth while to answer another of his famous 
harangues, though Grenville afterward read it with ex- 
treme admiration, and pronounced it one of his grandest 
efforts.* 

A less important fault was a certain lack of refinement 
and delicacy of taste, which Wilkes wittily characterized 
when, in allusion to what was said of Apelles' Venus, that 
her flesh seemed as if she had fed on roses, he declared 
that Burke's oratory " would sometimes make one suspect 
that he eats potatoes and drinks whisky." In his invec- 
tives, especially, Burke often indulges in the most intem- 
perate and grossly offensive language, which sometimes 
reaches such a degree of violence as to provoke a reaction 
in favor of his victim. In his fury against Warren Hast- 
ings, he compares him to "a sow," to "the keeper of a pig- 
sty, wallowing in filth and corruption," and to " a rat or a 
weasel." " When we assimilate him to such contemptible 
animals, we do not mean to convey an idea of their incapa- 

* Mr. Rush, the American Minister, relates that Erskine said to him: "I 
was in the House when Burke made his great speech on American conciliation, 
— the greatest he ever made,— he drove everybody away. When I read it, I 
read it over and over again ; I could hardly think of anything else. " 



POLITICAL ORATORS — BURKE. 273 

bility of doing injury. When God punished Pharaoh and 
Egypt, it was not by armies, but by locusts and lice, which, 
though small and contemptible, are capable of the greatest 
mischiefs." In his picture of Carnot drinking the life- 
blood of a king, and " snorting away the fumes of indiges- 
tion" in consequence, Burke reminds one of the "scolding J@s 
of the ancients." 

But let us not dwell upon these exceptional passages 
of Burke, at which, in his cool moments, his own taste 
must have revolted, but pass to one of his grand out- 
bursts, where his genius shines out in its fullest lustre. 
One of the finest specimens, perhaps the finest, of Burke's 
eloquence is the famous passage in the speech on the 
Nabob of Arcot's debts, in which is described the descent 
of Hyder Ali on the Carnatic. Who that has once read 
it can ever forget "the black cloud " into which Hyder 
Ali " compounded all the materials of fury, havoc, and 
desolation," and " hung for awhile on the declivities of 
the mountains"; the "storm of universal fire that blasted" 
the land; the crowd of prisoners "enveloped in a whirl- 
wind of cavalry " (an illustration like one of Lucan's, 
who speaks of "a storm of horse"); "the people in beg- 
gary, — a nation that stretched out its hands for food"; 
the absolution "of their impious vow by Hyder Ali and 
his yet more ferocious son"; an absolution so complete 
that the British army, in traversing the Carnatic for 
hundreds of miles, in all directions, " through the whole 
line of their march did not see one man, not one woman, 
not one child, not one four-footed beast of any descrip- 
tion whatever"; and the climax, where the orator bids 
his audience figure to themselves " an equal extent of our 
sweet and cheerful country, — from Thames to Trent north 



274 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

and south, and from the Irish to the German sea east and 
west, — emptied and emboweled (may God avert the omen 
of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation? 1 ' The 
best proof of the intense vividness and power of this 
passage, is the fact that, hackneyed as it is, and worn to 
shreds by schoolboy declamation, no person of taste and 
sensibility can read it, or hear it, for the hundredth or 
five hundredth time, without a tingling of the blood in 
every vein. 

It would be difficult to name a more striking exam- 
ple of the force of what may be called classical prejudice 
than Lord Brougham's comments on this memorable pas- 
sage. Contrasting with it the description by Demosthenes 
of the terror and confusion at Athens, when the news 
arrived that Elateia had been seized by Philip of Mace- 
don, and when, amid the general silence that followed 
the proclamation of the herald, Demosthenes arose, and 
suggested measures that caused all the dangers to pass 
away waxep v^oc, "like a cloud," Lord Brougham says: 
" Demosthenes uses but a single word, and the work is 
done." True; but ivhat is the work that is done? Is there 
a tyro in public speaking who could not compare the 
passing away of a great danger to the passing away of 
a cloud? It is the prerogative of genius to take an old 
image or metaphor, from which all the beauty and vivid- 
ness have faded, and, by a few original touches, give it a 
new brilliancy and effect. In the present case Burke has 
taken a hackneyed, worn-out figure, and, by expansion and 
elaboration, has transformed it into one of the most pic- 
turesque images in modern oratory. Again, Lord Broug- 
ham, somewhat hypercritically, objects to the confusion in 
Burke's imagery because he compares Hyder Ali's army 



POLITICAL ORATORS — SHERIDAN. 275 

first to "a black cloud," then to a "meteor," then to a 
" tempest." To the hearers of the speech, however, we 
have no doubt that this very variation of the imagery, 
at which a pedagogue would carp, served only to heighten 
the vividness and effect of the picture of the terrible war- 
rior and his host advancing from the menacing encamp- 
ment on the mountain to the massacre on the plain. 
So, again, the secondary touches which fill up the picture, 
such as the " blackening of all the horizon," the " goading 
spears of the drivers," and " the trampling of pursuing 
horses," instead of diminishing the effect, as his Lordship 
contends, serve, we think, to swell the fearful grandeur of 
the tempest which poured over the plains of the Carnatic. 
A juster criticism is that of other writers, who complain 
of the visual inaccuracy of a "meteor, blackening all the 
horizon," and that the first two sentences of the passage 
lack simplicity and directness, being too much clogged 
with qualifying thoughts. 

Of none of the great orators of Great Britain is it more 
difficult at this day to form a just opinion than of that ver- 
satile genius, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, of whom Byron 
sang, 



"Nature formed but one such man, 
And broke the die in moulding Sheridan 



; \0- 



There are acute critics who even deny that he was a great 
orator. His taste, they declare, was radically vicious. His 
sentiments were clap-trap; his rhetoric florid, if not bom- 
bastic; the apostrophes and the invocations which so daz- 
zled his hearers, were only fit to be addressed to the galle- 
ries by some hero of a melodrama. He was not an eagle 

" Sailing in supreme dominion 
Through the azure deep of air," 



276 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

but only a kite, with a keen eye and heavy body, labori- 
ously beating his way through the reluctant ether. De 
Quincey does not hesitate to pronounce him an absolute 
charlatan; he was a mocking-bird, he says, through the 
entire scale, from the highest to the lowest note of the 
gamut, — in fact, the mere impersonation of humbug. 
" Of Goldsmith it was said in his epitaph, Nil tetigit 
quod non ornavit; of the Drury-Lane rhetorician it might 
be said with equal truth, Nil tetigit quod non fuco adul- 
teravit." There is, no doubt, some ground for these 
accusations; but the question is not whether Sheridan 
was an original thinker, or whether he did not sometimes 
sin against a fastidious taste, but how did he affect those 
who listened to him? Was he, or was he not, a formidable 
adversar} r in debate? Did he, or did he not, stir up the 
souls of his hearers from their innermost depths? Did he, 
or did he not, charm, convince, and persuade his auditors? 
This is the only true criterion of oratory, the great end 
of which, it must be remembered, is to persuade, and by 
carrying captive the passions, to attack through them the 
citadel of reason. Tried by this test, Sheridan, we think, 
must be pronounced a great orator. 

To begin with, he had naturally many of the elements of 
a first-rate speaker. He had a pleasing countenance, a voice 
with mellifluous tones and of considerable depth and com- 
pass, a rare versatility of talents, a knowledge of the human 
heart and the way to touch its chords, an abundance of self- 
assurance, and a temper which defied every attempt to 
ruffle it. His manner was theatrical, but full of life and 
energy. He delighted especially in antithesis, apostrophes, 
and rhetorical exaggeration. Habitually indolent, destitute 
of profound political knowledge, incapable of projecting 



POLITICAL ORATORS — SHERIDAN". 277 

great measures, he yet became one of the champions of 
his party, and was more feared by his adversaries than 
were leaders who had far greater knowledge and abili- 
ties. Good sense and wit, we are told, were the ordinary 
weapons of his oratory; it was hard to say in which he 
excelled, the instinctive insight with which he detected 
the weak points of an adversary, or the inimitable raillery 
with which he exposed them. " He wounded deepest, 1 ' 
says Wraxall, " when he smiled, and convulsed his hearers 
with laughter, while the object of his ridicule or animad- 
version was twisting under the lash." When Pitt, still a 
young man, stung by his witticisms, undertook in that vein 
of arrogant sarcasm for which he was afterward so noted, 
to crush him by a contemptuous allusion to his theatrical 
pursuits, he was met with a quick and sharp rebuke: 
" Flattered and encouraged by the right honorable gentle- 
man's panegyric on my talents, if I ever again engage in 
the composition he alludes to, I may be tempted to an act 
of presumption, and attempt an improvement on one of 
Ben Jonson's best characters, that of the Angry Boy, in 
' The Alchymist.' " When urged to speak on topics which 
exacted extensive knowledge, or an appeal to authorities, 
he would frankly say: "You know I am an ignoramus; 
but here I am, — instruct me, and I'll do my best." Few 
persons could have acquitted themselves creditably under 
such disadvantages; yet such was the quickness and pene- 
tration of his intellect, that he was able speedily to master 
the information they provided, and to pour it forth with 
a freshness and vivacity that seemed like the results of 
long familiarity rather than of impromptu acquisition. 

During the first seven years in Parliament, Sheridan 
gave no signal exhibition of his powers as an orator. 



278 ORATORY A^D ORATORS. 

His short, sharp attacks on Pitt and Rigby, and occasional 
bursts of remonstrance against the Tory measures, gave 
some idea of his mettle; but he did nothing to stamp 
him as " the worthy rival of the wondrous Three," till 
he took part in the impeachment of Warren Hastings. 
Fortunately for the display of his genius, he was assigned 
the charge relating to the Begums, — a topic which gave 
full scope for the exertion of his peculiar powers. On 
this charge he delivered two speeches, — one in the House 
of Commons, the other soon after in Westminster Hall. 
Of the first of these eagle-flights of full-grown genius, 
which occupied five hours and a half, no adequate record 
has been preserved. It is enough to say that it was, by 
universal confession, one of the most dazzling and powerful 
efforts of oratory in modern times. Men of all parties 
vied with each other in their praise. ,; One heard every- 
body in the street, 11 says Walpole, " raving on the wonders 
of that speech." He adds that there must be a witchery 
in its author, who had no diamonds, as Hastings had, to 
win favor with, and that the Opposition may fairly be 
charged with sorcery. Fox, a severe judge, declared that 
f " all that he ever heard, all that he had ever read, when 
compared with it, dwindled into nothing, and vanished 
like vapor before the sun. 1 ' Burke, Pitt, Windham and 
Wilberforce. agreed in placing it above all other, even 
the most wonderful, performances of ancient or modern 
times. Within twenty-four hours from its delivery, Sheri- 
dan was offered a thousand pounds for the copyright, if 
he could correct it for the press. This he never did. and 
in the outline that has come down to us we have but a 
faint adumbration of the speech. A signal proof of its 
power, was that the House deemed it necessary to adjourn. 



POLITICAL ORATORS — SHERIDAN. 279 

to give the astonished audience time " to collect its reason," 
and recover from the dazzling enchantments and the 'ex- 
citements it had undergone. One member declared that 
" nothing, indeed, but information almost equal to a mira- 
cle could determine him to vote for the charge; but he 
had just felt the influence of such a miracle, and he could 
not but ardently desire to avoid an immediate decision.'" 
But the highest testimony was that of Logan, the de- 
fender of Hastings. After Sheridan had spoken an hour, 
Logan said to a friend: "All this is declamatory assertion 
without proof." Another hour passed, and he muttered: 
" This is a most wonderful oration." A third, and he 
confessed: "Mr. Hastings has acted ver}^ unjustifiably." 
At the end of the fourth, he exclaimed: "Mr. Hastings 
is a most atrocious criminal." At last, before the speech 
was concluded, he vehemently protested: "Of all mon- 
sters of iniquity, the most enormous is Warren Hastings ! " 
At a later day Byron, in his " Monody," with pardonable 
poetical exaggeration, sang: V - 

"'When the loud cry of trampled Hindostan 
Arose to heaven in her appeal to man, 
His was the thunder, his the avenging rod. 
The wrath, the delegated voice of God, 
Which shook the nations through his lips, and blazed 
Till vanquished senates trembled as they praised.'" 

Among the epigrammatic parts of the speech, one of 
the most notable is the denunciation of the sordid spirit 
of trade which characterized the operations of the East- 
India Company as a government: 

" There was something in the frame and constitution of the Company 
which extended the sordid principles of their origin over all their successive 
operations, connecting with their civil policy, and even with their boldest 
achievements, the meanness of a pedler and the profligacy of pirates. Alike in 
the political and the military line could be observed auctioneering ambassadors 
and trading generals ; and thus we saw a revolution brought about by affidavits; 
an army employed in executing an arrest; a town besieged on a note of hand; 



280 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

a prince dethroned for the balance of an account. Thus it was that they exhib- 
ited a government which united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre and the 
little traffic of a merchant's counting-house, wielding a truncheon in one hand 
and picking a pocket with the other.' 1 

An acute writer has well observed that there is a sin- 
gular felicity in the skill with which the speaker here 
drags down the governor of a vast empire to the level 
of the common herd of profligates and criminals by con- 
necting his greatest acts with the same motives which 
influence the pick-pocket and the cut-throat. " By bring- 
ing the large conceptions and benevolent aims which should 
characterize a ruler of nations into startling contrast with 
the small personal aims which animate the heroes of 
Hounslow Heath, he had an opportunity to play the daz- 
zling fence of his wit with the most brilliant effect. 1 ' * 

When the Commons had voted to impeach Hastings. 
Sheridan, as one of the managers, delivered before a more 
august assembly another oration on the subject of his 
former masterpiece. — viz. the defendant's ill-treatment of 
the Benares rajah and the Oude princesses. The pro- 
ceedings opened in Westminster Hall, the noblest room in 
England, on the 13th of February, 1788. The Queen and 
four of her daughters were present, and the Prince of 
Wales walked in at the head of a hundred and fifty peers 
of the realm. Never, perhaps, was public expectation, on 
such an occasion, wrought to a higher pitch. So great 
was the eagerness to obtain seats, that fifty guineas were 
paid for a single ticket. For four days the great, noble, 
and beautiful of the land hung on the eloquence which 
Sheridan's former great effort had not exhausted; and 
though his oration was disfigured by many extravagances 
and meretricious ornaments, and was certainly inferior to 

* "Essays and Reviews,'" by Edwin P. Whipple. 



POLITICAL ORATORS — SHERIDAN. 281 

that in the House of Commons, yet all agreed in pro- 
nouncing it a speech of prodigious power. Burke went 
so far as to say that, from poetry up to eloquence, there 
was not a species of composition of which a complete 
and perfect specimen might not be culled from it. In 
reading the verbatim report of the speech, in cold blood, 
to-day, we find little to justify the homage which it re- 
ceived on its delivery; but the same observation, as we 
have already seen, may be made of many of the most 
eloquent speeches that have ever thrilled an assembly. 
Half of the power of eloquence, it must be remembered, 
consists in its adaptation to the time, place, and audience. 
Even the great Oration for the Crown, the mightiest dis- 
play of eloquence known in the annals of mankind, fails 
to awaken to-day in the soul of the reader the senti- 
ments of enthusiasm and intense admiration to which it 
gave birth in the Athenian Agora. 

Sheridan's greatest defect as an orator was, apparently, 
his lack of deep convictions. Without these a command- 
ing eloquence is impossible. On the trial he was wrought 
up to an unusual pitch of feeling; but commonly he was 
best fitted for what has been called the Comedy of De- 
bate. Often when his associates failed with their heavy 
guns to demolish the enemy's works, his lighter artillery 
played upon them with telling effect. Overwhelming his 
adversaries with ridicule, he was equally successful in de- 
fending himself from their shafts. When Mr. Law, the 
counsel for Hastings, ridiculed one of his forced and tumid 
metaphors, he replied : "It is the first time in my life 
that I have ever heard of special pleading on a metaphor, 
or a bill of indictment against a trope. But such was 
the turn of the learned counsel's mind, that, when he at- 
12* 



282 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

tempted to be humorous, no jest could be found, and when 
serious, no fact was visible." Sheridan's excellence in all 
the departments of oratory, except perhaps the strictly 
argumentative, reminds one of an ancient pentathlete. 
Inferior to Pitt in dignit}^ of manner, to Fox in argu- 
ment and vehemence, and to Burke in imagination, depth, 
and comprehensiveness of thought, he was listened to with 
more delight than any one of them. Burke, in spite of 
his gorgeous periods, was often coughed down ; Pitt wearied 
his hearers by his starch and mannerisms, and Fox tired 
them by his repetitions; but Sheridan "won his way by 
a sort of fascination." When he arose to speak, a low 
murmur of eagerness ran round the House; every word 
was watched for, and his pleasantry set the whole House 
in a roar. In the social circle he was equally bewitch- 
ing. Byron, who declared that his talk was "superb"; 
Fox, who pronounced him the wittiest man he had ever 
met with; and Moore, his biographer, have all testified to 
the brilliancy of his conversation, though none of them 
have deemed it possible to do justice by any description 
to those quick flashes of repartee, that rolling fire of light 
raillery, the sharp vollies of vivid satire, the dropping 
flight of epigrams, for which he was so famed. The latter 
writer has happily portrayed him as 

"The orator, dramatist, minstrel, who ran 
Through each mode of the lyre, and was master of all ; 
Whose mind was an essence compounded with art 
From the finest and best of all other men's powers: 
Who ruled like a wizard the world of the heart, 
And could call up its sunshine or bring down its showers." 

Probably no orator ever bestowed more labor upon the 
preparation of his speeches, even to the pettiest details, 
than Sheridan. He never, says his biographer, made a 



POLITICAL OEATOES — SHERIDAN. 283 

speech of any moment, of which a sketch was not found 
in his papers, with the showy parts written two or three 
times over. His memoranda show that the minutest points 
had been carefully considered, even to marking the exact 
place in which his apparently involuntary exclamation, 
"Good God! Mr. Speaker, 1 ' was to be introduced, and the 
occasions on which he was to be hurried into impromptu 
bursts of passion. Even his wit, so brilliant and spark- 
ling, was carefully conned and learned by rote. Whole 
mornings were secretly given to it, which were supposed 
to be spent in the indolent sleep of fashion, and many of 
his happiest " improvisations " were jests that had been 
kept in pickle for months. Noting down his best thoughts 
in a memorandum-book, as they occurred to him, he had 
always at hand some felicities to weave into a conversa- 
tion or speech. Some of these absolutely haunted him. 
and nothing can be more amusing than to note the vari- 
ous forms through which some of his sarcastic pleasant- 
ries passed from their first germ to " the bright, consum- 
mate flower " which he gave to the public. It was in 
allusion to this practice of preparing and polishing his 
jests, and waiting for an opportunity to fire them off, — 
of creating an opportunity when it was slow to come, — 
that Pitt taunted him with his " hoarded repartees and 
matured jests." 

Of these elaborated impromptus the following is an ex- 
ample. In his commonplace book he speaks of a person 
" who employs his fancy in his narrative, and keeps his 
recollections for his wit." This was afterward expanded 
into the following: " When he makes his jokes, you ap- 
plaud the accuracy of his memory, and it is only when 
he states his facts that you admire the flights of his im- 



284 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

agination/' But so sparkling a jest was not to be hid- 
den in the pages of a note-book; so it was fired off at a 
composer of music who had turned wine-merchant: ''You 
will import your music, and compose your wine/' Even 
this use of the thought did not satisfy Sheridan, while its 
capabilities of application were still unexhausted; and so 
it was fired off in a seemingly careless parenthesis, in a 
speech in reply to Dundas, t; a right honorable gentleman 
who generally resorts to his memory for his jokes, and 
to his imagination for his facts." Again, Sheridan was 
greatly pleased, apparently, with a metaphor he had drawn 
from the terms of military science. " A true trained wit," 
he says, " lay s his plan like a general, — foresees the cir- 
cumstances of the conversation, — surveys the ground and 
contingences. — and detaches a person to draw you into 
the palpable ambuscade of his ready-made joke." This 
idea next appears in a sketch of a lady who affects poet- 
ry: "I made regular approaches to her by sonnets and 
rebuses, — a rondeau of circumvallation, — her pride sapped 
by an elegy, and her reserve surprised by an impromptu; 
proceeding to storm with Pindarics, she at last saved the 
further effusion of ink by a capitulation.'' Most wits 
would have been satisfied with these triumphs; but Sheri- 
dan cannot abandon the witticism till he has shot it 
forth in a more elaborate and polished form in the House 
of Commons. The Duke of Richmond having introduced. 
in the session of 1786, a plan for the fortification of dock- 
yards, Sheridan complimented him on his genius as an 
engineer in the following mocking strain: "He had made 
his Report an argument of posts, and conducted his rea- 
soning upon principles of trigonometry as well as logic. 
There were certain detached data, like advanced works, 



POLITICAL ORATORS — SHERIDAN. 285 

to keep the enemy at a distance from the main objects 
in debate. Strong provisions covered the flanks of his as- 
sertions. His very queries were in casements. No im- 
pression, therefore, was to be made on this fortress of 
sophistry by desultory observations; and it was necessary 
to sit down before it, and assail it by regular approaches. 
It was fortunate, however, to observe, that notwithstand- 
ing all the skill employed by the noble and literary en- 
gineer, his mode of defense on paper was open to the 
same objections which had been urged against his other 
fortifications, that if his adversary got possession of one 
of his posts, it became strength against him, and the 
means of subduing the whole line of his arguments."* 

It was unfortunate for Sheridan's reputation as an 
orator that he was the son of a player, a dramatist, and 

* Because Sheridan thus prepared many of his brilliant sallies, it has been 
the fashion to scoff at his genius, and to infer that he was incapable of im- 
provising a splendid burst of eloquence or a sparkling witticism. The fact 
is, that nearly all great speakers have elaborated their finest passages, but, 
luckily, they have not all, like Sheridan, had biographers who have revealed 
" the secrets of the shop " A sensible writer says truly that most men of 
genius spend half of their time in day-dreaming about the art or subject in 
which they are interested or excel. The painter is peopling space with the 
forms that are to breathe on canvas; the poet is murmuring the words that 
are to burn along his lines ; and the wit who is welcomed at rich men's feasts, 
is constantly turning over his jests in his memory, to see what form of ex- 
pression will give them the most piquancy and point. There is no objection 
to the use of the utmost art in the preparation of important passages in a 
speech, if only the art is not apparent. It is well known that it was in fish- 
ing for trout in Marshfield, that Webster (who " in bait and debate was equally 
persuasive") composed the famous passage on the surviving veterans of the 
battle for his first Bunker Hill address. "He would pull out a lusty speci- 
men," says Starr King, " shouting l venerable men, you have come down to us 
from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, 
that you might behold this joyous day. 1 He would unhook them into his 
basket, declaiming, l You are gathered to your fathers, and live only to your 
country in her grateful remembrance and your own bright example.' In his 
boat, fishing for a cod, he composed or rehearsed the passage in it on Lafayette, 
when he hooked a very large cod, and, as he pulled his nose above water, 
exclaimed, 'Welcome! all hail! and thrice welcome, citizen of two hemi- 
spheres. ' " 



286 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

the manager of a theatre. That his critics have con- 
sequently looked upon him as an actor, not to say a 
charlatan and a trickster, — cannot be doubted. How 
much of his careless, procrastinating way sprang from 
-natural tendencies, and how much from a secret love of 
display and startling surprises, it is hard to say. Though 
he hated all needless and much needed labor, he could 
yet toil terribly for special ends. His practice in great 
emergences, was " to rise at four in the morning, light 
up a prodigious quantity of candles around him, and eat 
toasted muffins while he worked/' When, during the 
trial of Hastings, he was called on to reply to Mr. Law, 
and was asked by a brother manager for his bag and 
papers, he answered that he had none, but would get 
through his speech by hook or crook without them. " He 
would abuse Mr. Law, ridicule Plumer's long orations, 
make the court laugh, please the women, and get triumph- 
antly through the whole.'" As he went on, the Lord Chan- 
cellor again insisted on the reading of the minutes; and 
Fox, alarmed lest the lack of them should ruin the speech, 
inquired anxiously for the bag. " The man has no bag." 
whispered Taylor. The whole scene, Moore says, was a 
contrivance of Sheridan to astonish his hearers by his 
ability to make a speech without materials, since he had 
shut himself up for several days at Wanstead to elaborate 
this very oration, and read and wrote so hard that he 
complained at evening that he had motes before his eyes. 
"It was the fate of Mr. Sheridan throughout life," says 
his biographer, " and in a great degree his policy, to gain 
credit for excessive indolence and carelessness, while few 
persons, with so much natural brilliancy of talents, ever 
employed more art and circumspection in their display." 



POLITICAL ORATORS — GRATTAN. 287 

In the very front rank of the many brilliant orators 
whom Ireland has produced stands Henry Grattan. In 
his earliest youth he showed a remarkable taste for ora- 
tory, and he began to cultivate it almost as soon as he 
left college. Adopting Bolingbroke and Junius as his 
models, he committed certain passages of his speeches to 
memory, and, revolving them continually in his mind till 
he had weeded out every needless word, he brought his 
sentences at last to a degree of nervousness, polish, and 
condensation, that has hardly a parallel in oratory. While 
reading law in London, he fell under the spell of Chat- 
ham's eloquence, and from that moment everything else 
was forgotten in the one great aim of cultivating his 
powers as a public speaker. Among the means he adopted 
was that of declaiming in private, of which practice some 
amusing anecdotes are preserved. It is said that his land- 
lady in London wrote to his friends requesting that he 
should be removed, as he was always pacing her garden, 
and addressing some person whom he called " Mr. Speaker," 
which led her to doubt the sanity of her lodger. It is 
stated, also, that in one of his moonlight rambles in 
Windsor Forest, he stopped at a gibbet, and began apos- 
trophizing its chains in his usual impassioned strain, when 
he was suddenly tapped on the shoulder by a prosaic per- 
son, who inquired, "How the devil did you get down?" 
About this time he took also a prominent part in private 
theatricals: but, owing to his vehemence and abruptness 
of manner, his awkwardness and redundancy of gesture, 
and the lack of modulation in his voice, he met with but 
moderate success. 

In hardly one of G rattan's qualities as an actor was 
there a prophecy of his future greatness as an orator; 



288 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

and it is said that in the mechanical parts of public 
speaking he was always deficient. Laboring under man}' 
physical and intellectual disadvantages; short in stature 
and unprepossessing in appearance; almost sweeping the 
ground with his gestures, so that the motion of his 
long arms was compared to the rolling of a ship in a 
heavy swell; adding, at the beginning of his speeches, to 
his awkwardness and grotesqueness of manner a hesitating 
tone and a drawling emphasis; gifted by nature with little 
wit or pathos, and no pleasantry; he, nevertheless, became 
one of the greatest masters of oratory within the walls of 
St. Stephen. While he was inferior to several of his great 
contemporaries as a mere debater, he combined two of the 
highest qualities of an orator to a degree that was almost 
unexampled. " No British orator," says Mr. Lecky, " ex- 
cept Chatham, had an equal power of firing an educated 
audience with an intense enthusiasm, or of animating and 
inspiring a nation. No British orator except Burke had 
an equal power of sowing his speeches with profound 
aphorisms and associating transient questions with eternal 
truths. His thoughts naturally crystallized into epigrams: 
his arguments were condensed with such admirable force 
and clearness that they assumed almost the appearance of 
axioms; and they were often interspersed with sentences 
of concentrated poetic beauty, which flashed upon the 
audience with all the force of sudden inspiration, and 
which were long remembered and repeated. " His element. 
in the opinion of another critic, who often heard him in 
Parliament, was grandeur. As it was said of Michael 
Angelo that there was life in every touch of his chisel, and 
that he struck out forms and features from the marble 
with the power of a creator, so it might be said of Grat- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — GRATTA^. 289 

tan, that there was nothing mean or commonplace in his 
thoughts or images, but everything came fresh from his 
mind with the energy and vividness of a new creation. 
He had the power of investing the humblest themes with 
a sudden magnitude, and even the grievances of a casual 
impost, the delinquencies of the police, the artifices of an 
election, or the formalities of a measure of finance, became 
under his hand historic subjects, and were associated with 
recollections of intellectual triumph. 

In the invention, choice, and arrangement of arguments, 
he shows an originality, sagacity, and copiousness equal 
to those of any other British speaker; but his chief aim 
is not so much to conduct his hearers through long trains 
of reasoning, as to give them the concrete results of rea- 
son itself, — not to lead their minds to the understanding 
of a question by the labyrinth of a slow, tedious logical 
process, but by a single flash to fill them with illumina- 
tive conviction. It is this brilliant impassioned ardor, 
this impetuous movement, which preeminently distinguishes 
the oratory of Grattan, and impresses the reader of his 
speeches even more, perhaps, than his profound knowl- 
edge, his wisdom, his consummate art, his beautiful im- 
agery, and his exquisite diction, which we know not for 
what quality most to admire, — for its force, eloquence, and 
precision, or for that wondrous dithyrambic melody, that 
exquisite music of cadence, in which Grattan stands among 
all orators supreme. The blaze, the rapidity, the penetra- 
tion of Grattan's oratory, struck all who heard him. He 
poured out his arguments like a shower of arrows, but they 
were arrows tipped with fire. He was unmatched in crush- 
ing invective, in delineations of character, in terse, lumi- 
nous statement; he delighted in severe, concentrated ar« 
13 



290 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

gument, in biting sarcasm, and in flashing his ideas on 
the mind with a sudden, startling abruptness. In many 
of his sentences there is a condensed energy of expression 
which almost equals that of Tacitus. What an amount 
of feeling is conveyed in that sentence so famous for its 
touching and concentrated beauty, in which he speaks of 
his efforts to establish the freedom of the Irish Parlia- 
ment, and says: "I watched by its cradle; I followed its 
hearse!"* 

Grattan, unlike nearly all other orators, seemed to have 
before him two distinct classes of hearers when he spoke. 
— the audience he addressed, and a more enlightened 
auditory of the thoughtful few who could appreciate the 
highest excellences of oratory. He spoke so as to con- 
vince and charm his hearers, and at the same time to 
instruct future generations. His chief faults were his 
intense mannerism, his occasional incongruity of metaphor, 
and his excess of epigram and antithesis. Occasionally, 
though rarely, he was obscure, in allusion to which, and 
to his rapid force and brilliancy, his eloquence has been 
picturesquely characterized as "a combination of cloud, 
whirlwind, and flame." The rhythmus of his sentences, 
to whose exceeding beauty we have already alluded, must 
have been studied with great care. What can be finer 
than the close of his great speech in 1780, on moving a 
declaration of Irish right: "I have no ambition, unless 
it be to break your chain, and to contemplate your glory. 
I will never be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager 
in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking to his 

* In allusion to this passage. O'Connell, at a later day, proudly said: " Grat- 
tan sat by the cradle of his country, and followed her hearse : it was left for 
me to sound the resurrection trumpet, and to show that she was not dead, but 
sleeping.'" 



POLITICAL ORATORS — GRATTAJN. 291 

rags. He may be naked, he shall not be in irons. And 
I do see the time at hand; the spirit has gone forth; the 
Declaration of Right is planted; and though great men 
should fall off, yet the cause shall live; and though the 
public speaker should die, yet the immortal fire shall out- 
last the humble organ who conveys it, and the breath of 
liberty, like the word of the holy man, will not die with 
the prophet, but will survive him.' 1 The speech from 
which this peroration is taken is perhaps the finest effort 
of Grattan's genius. Nothing equal to it had ever before 
been heard in Ireland, nor was its superior probably ever 
delivered within the English House of Commons. Other 
speeches on the same subject may have matched it in ar- 
gument and information; but in startling energy and 
splendor of style it surpassed them all. Grattan did not 
merely convince his countrymen, but he dazzled and in- 
flamed them; he raised the question of Irish freedom into 
a loftier region of thought and sentiment than it had 
ever before occupied; and we are not surprised to learn 
that he became from that hour the idol of his country- 
men, and was looked upon as the prophet of Irish Re- 
demption. 

In his speech on the Downfall of Bonaparte, he char- 
acterizes Burke as " the prodigy of nature and of acqui- 
sition. He read everything, he saw everything, he fore- 
saw everything." Of Fox he says: "To do justice to * 
that immortal person, you must not limit your view to \ 
this country; his genius was not confined to England, 
it acted three hundred miles off in breaking the chains 
of Ireland; it was seen three thousand miles off in com- 
municating freedom to the Americans; it was visible I 
know not how far off in ameliorating the condition of 



292 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

the Indian; it was discernible on the coast of Africa 
in accomplishing the abolition of the slave-trade. You 
are to measure the magnitude of his mind by parallels of 
latitude." In the same speech he denounces the tyranny 
of Napoleon as " an experiment to universalize throughout 
Europe the dominion of the sword; to relax the moral 
and religious influences; to set heaven and earth adrift 
from one another; and make God Almighty a tolerated 
alien in his own creation." Warning England not to de- 
sert her allies, he says: ''In vain have you stopped in 
your own person the flying fortunes of Europe; in vain 
have you taken the eagle of Napoleon, and snatched in- 
vincibility from his standard, if now, when confederated 
Europe is ready to march, you take the lead in the de- 
sertion, and preach the penitence of Napoleon and the 
poverty of England." 

One of Grattan's most electric speeches was delivered 
when he was prostrated with disease, and so feeble that 
he could not walk without help. It is in this speech that 
occurs the memorable passage: "Yet I do not give up 
my country. I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead. 
Though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still 
there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a 
glow of beauty: 

u 'Thou art not conquered: beauty's ensign yet 
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks. 
And death's pale flag is not advanced there. 1 " 

Grattan was preeminently a born orator. Eloquence 
with him was not simply a means to an end, an instru- 
ment to gain power ; it was his native element, a necessity 
of his existence. It has been said that if he had been 
born among the backwoodsmen, he would have been an 



POLITICAL ORATORS — O'CONNELL. 293 

orator, and would have roused the men of the hatchet 
and the rifle. Wherever the tongue of man could have 
won influence, or impassioned and brilliant appeals could 
have given pleasure, he would have been listened to with 
admiration and delight. If he had not found an audience, 
he would have addressed the torrents and the trees; he 
would have sent forth his voice to the inaccessible moun- 
tains, and appealed to the inscrutable stars. 

Among the popular orators of Europe it would be im- 
possible to name another who ruled the stormy passions 
of the mob with so absolute a sway as was exercised by that 
giant and athlete of the tribune, Daniel O'Connell. He 
won his first laurels as an advocate, and rose swiftly to 
the highest rank in the profession. In managing a cause, 
vigilance and caution were his leading characteristics. 
Naturally impulsive, he affected to be careless; yet a more 
wary advocate, or one more jealously watchful of his 
client's interests, never scanned the looks of a jury. No 
great lawyer, it is said, ever had a truer relish for the 
legal profession: he had the eye of a lynx and the scent 
of a hound to detect a legal flaw, and hunted down a 
cause with all the gusto of a Kerry fox-hunter in pursuit 
of a reynard. Undiverted from attention to his duties 
by the temptations of idleness or pleasure, O'Connell never 
failed to be prepared for the important moment of trial, 
with all the restless power which a strong mind and a 
life of industry bestow. Few were so intimately acquaint- 
ed with the Irish character, and while he keenly enjoyed 
baffling the counsel for the prosecution, and bullying or 
perplexing the witnesses against the trembling culprit in 
the dock, he was rarely defeated by the skill of an ad- 



294 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

versary, or the stubbornness or cunning of a witness. In 
the criminal cases he played the part of an indignant 
lawyer to perfection ; caught up his brief-bag in a seeming 
fury, and dashed it against the witness-table, — frowned, 
— muttered fearfully to himself, — sat down in a rage, 
with a horrid scowl on his face; bounced up again, in 
a fit of boiling passion, and solemnly protested in the 
face of heaven against such injustice, — threw his brief 
away, — swaggered out of the court-house, — then swag- 
gered back again, and wound upj by brow-beating and 
abusing half-a-dozen more witnesses, and, without any 
real grounds whatever, finally succeeded in making half 
of the jury refuse to bring in a verdict of " Guilty." 

In civil causes, also, O'Connell stood at the head of the 
nisi priiis lawyers. In 'case of legacies, disputed estates, 
and questions springing out of family quarrels, he is re- 
ported to have been unrivalled for his tact, shrewdness, 
presence of mind, and especially for understanding the 
details of business. " He was not the match of Wallace," 
says a writer, ' ; in showing the cogency of an inapplica- 
ble reason; he was not so acute as O'Grady in piercing 
to the core of a refractory witness, and detecting perjury 
or fraud; he was not so shrewd as Pennefather in puz- 
zling the judges upon some subtle point, which had been 
raked from the dusty folios of technical perplexity, or 
hit upon b}' long and abstruse speculation: he had not 
the unimpassioned but graceful eloquence of North, pour- 
ing upon the ear like moonlight upon a marble statue; 
but he exhibited in an eminent degree the characteristic 
excellences of them all." He had a profound knowledge 
of human nature, and penetrated the motives of a plain- 
tiff or defendant with matchless skill. His stores of world- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — O'CONNELL. 295 

ly knowledge and legal lore, his keenness and ingenuity, 
his off-hand Irish readiness, his abundant subtlety in the 
invention of topics to meet an adversary's arguments, 
united to a penetration that never left one point of his 
own case unexplored, — his jolly temper and good-natured 
humor, — his biting ridicule and vehement eloquence, — all 
together rendered him absolutely matchless at the Irish bar. 
O'Connell's mind was rather strong and fiery than pol- 
ished and delicate. He was not a classical speaker, and 
his knowledge of literature was apparently small. There 
was, at times, a degree of coarseness in his harangues; 
and he had, indeed, one of the most venomously sarcastic 
tongues ever put into the head of man. He used to say- 
that he was the best abused man in all Europe. But, 
whoever abused him, he knew how to repay all such 
scores with most usurious interest. He could pound an 
antagonist with denunciation, riddle him with invective, 
or roast him alive before a slow fire of sarcasm. A good 
illustration of his style of attack is furnished by the fu- 
rious altercation between him and Disraeli, when the lat- 
ter turned Tory, and was pronounced by O'Connell as one 
" who, if his genealogy could be traced, would be found 
to be the lineal descendant and true heir-at-law of the im- 
penitent thief who atoned for his crimes upon the cross," 
— a touch of genius worthy of Swift or Byron. Proba- 
bly no sarcasm of Disraeli ever made an enemy writhe 
with a tithe of the anguish which he himself suffered from 
this, which went like a poisoned arrow to the mark, and 
rankled like a barbed one. In nick-names, O'Connell was 
especially happy, as in his "Scorpion Stanley" and "Spin- 
ning-jenny Peel." The smile of the latter, he said, was 
"like the silver plate on a coffin." 



296 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

As a popular orator before a miscellaneous audience, 
O'Connell had few equals. John Randolph, who had good 
opportunities of forming a judgment, pronounced him the 
first orator in Europe. Every chord of the "harp of a 
thousand strings " lay open to his touch, and he played 
upon it with a master's hand. His voice, which Disraeli 
admitted to have been the finest ever heard in Parliament, 
was deep, sonorous, distinct, and flexible. In its transi- 
tions from the higher to the lower notes, it was won- 
drously effective. All who heard him were enchanted by 
its swelling and sinking waves of sound, its quiet and soft 
cadences of beauty, alternated with bass notes of grandeur ; 
and even its "divinely-managed brogue'" added not a little 
to its charm, especially when he indulged in sparkles of 

" Easy humor, blossoming 
Like the thousand flowers of spring.'" 

One of the most marked traits of his oratory, was its 
utter self-abnegation. He had no rhetorical trickery; 
he never strove, like his contemporary, Sheil, to strike 
and dazzle, — to create a sensation and be admired. Of 
the thousands and tens of thousands who heard him, 
whether thundering in the Senate or haranguing the 
multitude on his route from his coach-roof, not one per- 
son probably ever dreamed that a sentence of that flow- 
ing stream of words had been pre-studied. His bursts of 
passion displayed that freshness and genuineness which art 
can so seldom counterfeit. " The listener," says Mr. Lecky, 
"seemed almost to follow the workings of his mind, — to 
perceive him hewing his thoughts into rhetoric with a 
negligent but colossal grandeur; with the chisel, not of 
a Canova, but of a Michael Angelo." 

There was no chord of feeling that he could not strike 



POLITICAL ORATORS — O'CONNELL. 297 

with power. Melting his hearers at one moment by his 
pathos, he convulsed them at the next by his humor; bear- 
ing them in one part of his speech to a dizzy height on 
the elastic wing of his imagination, in another he would 
make captive their judgments by the iron links of his 
logic. No actor on the stage surpassed him in revealing 
the workings of the mind through the windows of the 
face. Not the tongue only, but the whole countenance 
spoke; he looked every sentiment as it fell from his lips. 
"He could whine and wheedle, and wink with one eye, 
while he wept with the other." It is said that on one 
occasion a deputation of Hindoo chiefs, while listening 
to his recital before an assembly of the wrongs of India, 
never took their eyes off him for an hour and a half, 
though not one word in ten was intelligible to their 
ears. His gesticulation, says an intelligent American 
writer, who heard him when at the height of his fame, 
"was redundant, never commonplace, strictly sui generis, 
far from being awkward, not precisely graceful, and yet 
it could hardly have been more forcible, and, so to speak, 
illustrative. He threw himself into a great variety of 
attitudes, all evidently unpremeditated. Now he stands 
bolt upright, like a grenadier. Then he assumes the 
port and bearing of a pugilist. Now he folds his arms 
upon his breast, utters some beautiful sentiment, relaxes 
them, recedes a step, and gives wing to the coruscations 
of his fancy, while a winning smile plays over his coun- 
tenance. Then he stands at ease, and relates an anecdote 
with the rollicking air of a horse-jockey at Donnybrook 
fair. Quick as thought, his indignation is kindled, and, 
before speaking a word, he makes a violent sweep with 
his arm, seizes his wig as if he would tear it in pieces, 



298 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

adjusts it to its place, throws his body into the attitude 
of a gladiator, and pours out a flood of rebuke and de- 
nunciation.'" 

In person, O'Connel] had many of the qualifications 
of an orator, his appearance corresponding to his mind. 
He was tall and muscular, with a broad chest, and Her- 
culean shoulders as extensive as the burden he had to 
bear. From his strong and homely look, and his careless 
and independent swing as he walked along, he might 
have been taken for a plain, wealthy farmer, had not his 
face been occasionally enlivened by an eye of fire. In 
private life he was enthusiastically admired. Warm and 
generous in his feelings, cordial and frank in his manners, 
loving a good joke, having an exhaustless supply of wit 
and humor, he was every way so fascinating in manners, 
that even the veriest Orangeman who had drunk knee- 
deep to the " Glorious Memory," and strained his throat 
in giving " one cheer more ,? for Protestant ascendency, 
could not sit ten minutes by the side of the " Great Agi- 
tator " without being charmed into the confession that 
no man was ever better fitted to win and hold the hearts 
of his countrymen. He was a born king among his fel- 
low-men. — so truly such, that even his faults and errors 
had a princely air. His early excesses and sins were 
royal in their extravagance. His highest glory is, that, 
though not a statesman, he was a daring and successful 
political agitator; that he revolutionized the whole social 
system of Ireland, and remodelled by his influence its 
representative, ecclesiastical and educational institutions; 
that, if he indulged sometimes in ribaldry and vulgar 
abuse, his fury was poured out upon meanness, injustice, 
and oppression; that he championed the cause of human- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — SHEIL. 299 

ity without regard to clime, color, or condition; and that 
wherever the moan of the oppressed was heard, there, too, 
was heard the trumpet-voice of O'Connell, rousing the 
sympathies of mankind, rebuking the tyrant, and cheering 
the victim. 

Lack of space forbids us from attempting to portray 
the oratory of Richaed Lalor Sheil, so utterly unlike 
that of O'Connell, with whom he was so often associated. 
A Southern writer, about thirty years ago, thus vividly 
contrasted the artificial styles of Sheil and Macaulay with 
the spontaneous eloquence of Grattan and Burke: " Ma- 
caulay's genius is the genius of scholasticism. He is a 
living library; and the old vulgarism, 'He talks like a 
book,' is a literal truth in his case. We look upon him 
as the last of the rhetoricians who considered style of 
more importance than facts, and paid more attention to 
the manner than to the matter of their discourse. Nor 
is he even the greatest of that school. He was excelled 
by Richard Lalor Sheil, who had always laid by a stock 
of good things, pickled and preserved for use. The Irish- 
man was more rapid and agile than his Scotch rival, and 
sent up rockets while the other was spinning catherine- 
wheels. A shrewd wit called Sheil ' a fly in amber,' and 
the title was appropriate enough ; but Macaulay is a fossil 
of far greater solidity and size, and of less immediate 
radiance. Both belong to the artificial school, which is 
rapidly passing away. The palmy days of parliamentary 
oratory in England must be over, when the House is filled 
to hear Macaulay. The slipshod, conversational style, which 
has succeeded the dignified declamation of the last genera- 
tion, must be wearisome and worthless indeed, when his 



BOO ORATORY AND OKATOKS. 

cold correctness and passionless pomp are hailed as a pleas- 
urable relief. Oh! for an hour of Henry Grattan, with 
his fierce and flashing style, — his withering sarcasm, — 
his lofty imagery, which flew with the wing of an eagle, 
and opened its eyes at the sun, — to rouse these prosy cits 
and yawning squires into something like energy and life! 
Oh! for the words of Burke, so rich, so rotund, so many- 
hued, which passed before the gaze like a flight of purple 
birds, to recall to the jaded Commons a sense of true 
imagination, of genuine eloquence! It is true Burke was 
called ' The Dinner Bell ' by his contemporaries, for his 
speeches were a little voluminous sometimes ; but the 
nickname was given in a time when ' there were giants 
upon the earth ' ; now his voice would be considered a 
tocsin; such is the degeneracy of British orators!" 



CHAPTER XL 

POLITICAL ORATORS: AMERICAN. 

A MERICA has produced several great orators, to whom 
-^--*- it has been permitted " to open the trumpet-stop 
on the grand organ of human passion"; and among them 
there is no greater name than that of Patrick Henry 
Unfortunately we have only a few imperfect fragments of 
his speeches, and his fame rests, therefore, not on authen- 
ticated specimens of his oratory, but on the tradition of 
the electrical shocks he produced on great occasions by 
the glow, the lightning flash, the volcanic fire of genius. 
Doubtless there is much exaggeration in the traditional 
reports of his voice, his manner, and the necromantic 
effects he wrought; but, after making every reasonable 
deduction for this, we cannot doubt that he was one of 
the greatest orators that ever lived. Like the bones of 
an antediluvian giant, the portions of his speeches that 
have come down to us are proof of his mental and moral 
stature. Mr. Henry was of Scotch descent, and was born 
in Virginia in 1736. His father, who emigrated to this 
country in 1730, was nephew to the great Scotch histo- 
rian, Dr. William Robertson, and cousin-german, it is said, 
to the mother of Lord Brougham. Probably no man who 
rose to eminence, ever gave in his youth so little promise 
of distinction as did " the forest-born Demosthenes " of 
America. He picked up a little Latin and Greek, with a 

301 



;>? 



302 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

smattering of mathematics; but was naturally indolent, 
and manifested a decided aversion to stud}' which he never 
fully overcame. When the hour came for application to 
his books, he was generally to be found by the river-side 
with his fishing-rod, or in the woods with his gun. Often 
he would wander for days together through the fields and 
woods, sometimes listlessly, with no apparent aim, some- 
times in the pursuit of game; or he would lie stretched 
on the green bank of some sunny stream, watching the 
ripples and eddies as they whirled along, or angling in 
its sparkling waters. The same distaste for labor fol- 
lowed him into the pursuits of business, where he only 
exchanged the pleasures of hunting and angling, and the 
luxury of day-dreaming, for the melodies of the flute and 
violin, and tales of love and war. Becoming a shop-keeper 
at sixteen, he was bankrupt within a year; a two years' 
trial of farming sufficed to prove his unfitness for that 
pursuit; and another experiment in ''keeping store/' which 
lasted but for a year, ended by making him penniless. 
Meanwhile he had acquired a taste for reading, and had 
turned to account his intercourse with his customers in 
a way that enabled him, when he came upon the public 
stage, to touch the springs of human passion with a mas- 
ter-hand. When these persons met in his store, he seized 
the opportunity to study human nature as exhibited in 
their peculiarities of character; and it was afterward 
remembered that as long as they were gay and talkative, 
he generally was silent, but whenever the conversation 
flagged, he adroitly re-began it so as to bring those pecu- 
liarities into play. One book seems to have been a favor- 
ite with him. Whilst his farm was going to ruin, or his 
customers were waiting to be served, he was absorbed in 



POLITICAL ORATORS— HEXRY. 303 

a translation of Livy, whose harangues had a peculiar 
fascination for him. 

At length the thought struck him that he might make 
a living by becoming a lawyer, To the jealous science 
which, according to Lord Coke, allows of no other mistress, 
he paid his attentions, which were not apt to be undivided, 
for six weeks, — a high authority says, one month; yet dur- 
ing that time he read Coke upon Littleton and the Virginia 
laws. It was with some difficulty that he obtained a license 
to practice, and it was only upon the ground that he was 
evidently a man of genius, and would be likely soon to fill 
up the gaps in his knowledge. For the next four years he 
was plunged into the deepest poverty. During most of this 
time he lived with his father-in-law, and assisted him in 
tavern-keeping. At last an occasion arose for the display 
of his latent powers, and he sprang by one bound into 
celebrity. This was the " tobacco case," in which the clergy 
of the English church brought a suit to recover their an- 
nual stipend, as fixed by law, of sixteen thousand pounds 
of tobacco. The crop having failed, an Act had been 
passed by the Legislature allowing the planters to pay the 
tax in money, at the rate of 16s 8d per hundredweight, 
although the actual value was 50s or 60s. This Act was de- 
cided by the Court to be invalid, and nothing remained but 
to assess the damages by a writ of inquiry. Mr. Lewis, the 
planters' counsel, threw up the cause as hopeless, and they 
therefore applied to Henry, as none of the veteran practi- 
tioners was willing to risk his reputation upon it. When 
on the appointed day, in 1763, the cause came on for trial 
before the jury, a great crowd had assembled in the court- 
room, both of the common people and the clergy. As this 
was Henry's first appearance at the bar, curiosity was on 



304 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

tiptoe to watch his bearing and hear his accents. Rising 
awkwardly, he faltered so in his exordium that his friends 
hung their heads, the clergy began to exchange sly looks 
with each other, as if confident of their triumph, while his 
father, who was the presiding judge, almost sank with con- 
fusion from his seat. But the young advocate soon recov- 
ered his self-possession. Gradually his mind warmed with 
his theme; words came, ' ; like nimble and airy servitors," to 
his lips; his features were lighted up with the fire of 
genius; his attitude became erect and lofty; his action 
became graceful and commanding; his eye sparkled with 
intelligence; all that was coarse and clownish in his ap- 
pearance vanished, and he underwent " that mysterious 
and almost supernatural transformation, which the fire of 
his own eloquence never failed to work in him.'' The 
mocker}' of the clergy was soon turned into alarm. For 
a short time they listened as if spell-bound, but when, in 
answer to the eulogy of his opponent, the young lawyer 
turned upon them, and poured upon them a torrent of 
overwhelming invective, they fled from the bench in pre- 
cipitation and terror. The jury, as we have already seen 
(p. 17), under the wand of the enchanter, lost sight of law 
and evidence, and returned a verdict for the planters. For 
generations afterward the old people of the country could 
not think of a higher compliment to a speaker than to say 
of him: "He is almost equal to Patrick when he pled 
against the parsons." 

From this time Henry became the idol of the people, 
and a year afterward he was elected to the House of 
Burgesses. His first grand effort in this body was in 
support of resolutions which he had introduced against 
the Stamp Act. The old aristocratic members were star- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — HENRY. 305 

tied by his audacity, and an attempt was made to overawe 
the young and inexperienced member at the very outset. 
But Henry, though almost wholly unsupported by the in- 
fluential members, was equal to the occasion, and dashed 
into the ranks of the veteran statesmen with such steadi- 
ness and power as scattered their trained legions to the 
winds. The contest on the last and boldest resolution was, 
to use Jefferson's phrase, " most bloody," but the orator 
triumphed by a single vote. The intensity of the excite- 
ment may be inferred from a remark made after the 
adjournment by Peyton Randolph, the King's Attorney- 
General: "I would have given five hundred guineas for 
a single vote." The flame of opposition to British taxa- 
tion, which Henry had thus kindled, spread, as if on the 
wings of the wind, from one end of the land to the other; 
his resolutions, with progressive changes, were adopted by 
the other colonies; and the whole nation speedily found 
itself, as if by magic, in an attitude of determined hos- 
tility to the mother country. 

In 1774 Henry was elected a member of the first Con- 
gress, and in this august body his superiority was estab- 
lished as readily as in the House of Burgesses. Though 
the delegates had met for the express purpose of resist- 
ing the encroachments of the King and Parliament, they 
had apparently not fully weighed the fearful responsibil- 
ity which they had assumed till this hour. It now pressed 
upon them with overwhelming force, and when the or- 
ganization of the House was completed, a long and solemn 
pause followed, which Henry was the first to break. 
Rising slowly, as if borne down by the weight of his 
theme, he faltered through an impressive exordium, and 
then gradually launched forth into a vivid and burning 
13* 



306 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

recital of the colonial wrongs. We have no space for 
the details of his speech; it is sufficient to say that the 
wonder-working power of this, as of his other speeches, 
of which no exact report has come down to us, is proved 
by the very exaggeration of the accounts that are given 
of them. As he swept forward with his high argument, 
his majestic attitude, the spell of his eye, the charm of 
his emphasis, the " almost superhuman lustre of his coun- 
tenance," impressed even that august assemblage of the 
most eminent intellects of the nation with astonishment 
and awe. As he sat down, a murmur of admiration ran 
through the assembly; the convention, now nerved to ac- 
tion, shook off the incubus which had weighed on its spir- 
its; and Henry, as he had been proclaimed to be the first 
speaker in Virginia, was now admitted to be the greatest 
orator in America, 

A still greater speech was the memorable one delivered 
on March 20, 1775, when he brought forward in the Vir- 
ginia Convention his resolutions for arming and equip- 
ping the militia of the colony. The power of this effort 
is shown by the fact, not only that it has been worn to 
rags by schoolboys, with whom it has been a favorite 
selection for declamation for a century, and that it still 
fires the soul of the hearer when listened to for the hun- 
dredth time, but that the measures which it advocated 
were adopted, although their bare announcement had sent 
an electric shock of consternation through the assembly. 
Some of the firmest patriots in that body, including sev- 
eral of the most distinguished members of the late Con- 
gress, and, indeed, all the leading statesmen in the Con- 
vention, opposed the resolutions with all the power of 
their logic and all the weight of their influence; but in 



POLITICAL ORATORS — HENRY. 307 

vain; all objections were swept away as so many straws 
on the resistless tide of Henry's eloquence.* 

One of Henry's best efforts was his speech made after 
the Revolution in behalf of the British refugees. Against 
this class a bitter and deep-rooted prejudice was cherished, 
and to overcome it was no easy task. What can be finer 
than the following appeal both to the reason and pride of 
his hearers? — "The population of the old world is full to 
overflowing. . . . Sir, they are already standing upon tip- 
toe upon their native shores, and looking to your coasts 
with a wistful and longing eye. ... As I have no preju- 
dices to prevent my making use of them, so, sir, I have no 
fear of any mischief that they can do us. Afraid of them! 
— what, sir," said he, rising to one of his loftiest attitudes, 
and assuming a look of the most indignant and sovereign 
contempt, — " shall tve, who have laid the proud British Hon 
at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?" 

If we may judge by the speech in the case of John 
Hook, Henry's powers of wit, burlesque, and ridicule were 
hardly inferior to his graver faculties. Hook was a Scotch- 
man, fond of money, and suspected of being unfavorable to 
the American cause. Two of his bullocks had been seized 
in 1771 for the use of the troops; and, as soon as peace was 
established, he brought an action against the commissary. 
Henry was engaged for the defense. Mr. Wirt, Henry's 
biographer, states that, — 

* The famous phrase, "We must fight; I repeat it, sir, we must fights- 
was suggested to Henry by a letter of Major Joseph Hawley, of Northamp- 
ton, Mass., to John Adams. This letter, which concluded with the words. 
"After all, we must fight," was read by Adams to Henry, who listened to it 
with great attention, and, as soon as he heard these words, erected his head, 
and " with an energy and vehemence that 1 can never forget,' 1 says Mr. Adams. 

"broke out with— '•By G I am of that man's mind!'' " Mr. Adams adds 

that he considered this to be, not a taking of the name of God in vain, but a 
sacred oath upon a very great occasion. 



308 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

k ' He painted the distresses of the American army, exposed almost naked to 
the rigor of a winter's sky, and marking the frozen ground over which they 
marched with the blood of their unshod feet. 'Where was the man,' he said. 
1 who had an American heart in his bosom, who would not have thrown open his 
fields, his barns, his cellars, the doors of his house, the portals of his breast, to 
receive with open arms the meanest soldier in that little famished band of 
patriots? Where is the man? There he stands; but whether the heart of an 
American beats in his bosom, you, gentlemen, are to judge/ He then carried 
the jury, by the powers of his imagination, to the plains round York, the sur- 
render of which had followed shortly after the seizure of the cattle. He depicted 
the surrender in the most glowing and noble colors of his eloquence : the audi- 
ence saw before their eyes the humiliation and dejection of the British, as they 
marched out of their trenches ; they saw the triumph which lighted up every 
patriot face, and heard the shouts of victory, and the cry of l Washington and 
Liberty,' as it rang and echoed through the American ranks, and was reverber- 
ated from the hills and shores of the neighboring river. • But hark ! what notes 
of discord are these, which disturb the general joy, and silence the acclamations 
of victory? They are the notes of John Hook, hoarsely bawling through the 
American camp, beef/ beef! beef!' " 

Mr. Wirt states that the clerk of the court, unable to 
restrain his merriment, and unwilling to commit any 
breach of decorum, rushed out, and rolled on the ground 
in a paroxysm of laughter. " Jemmy Steptoe, what the 
devil ails ye, mon?" exclaimed Hook, the plaintiff. Mr. 
Steptoe could only reply that he could not help it. " Never 
mind ye," said Hook; '"wait till Billy Cowan gets up; he'll 
show him the la\" But Billy Cowan's plea was unavailing. 
The cause was decided by acclamation; and a cry of tar and 
feathers having succeeded to that of beef, the plaintiff 
deemed it prudent to beat a precipitate retreat. 

In appearance Henry was rather striking than prepos- 
sessing. Tall, spare, raw-boned, and slightly stooping in 
the shoulders, — dark and sunburnt in complexion, and 
having a habitual contraction of the brow which gave 
him a harsh look till he spoke, — he gave no indication 
of the majesty and grace which he assumed when his genius 
was roused. When he spoke, his whole appearance under- 
went a marvellous transformation. His person rose erect; 



POLITICAL ORATORS — HENRY. 309 

his head, instead of drooping, was thrown proudly aloft: 
and he seemed like another being. His eyes, which were 
overshadowed by dark, thick eyebrows, were his finest 
feature. Brilliant, full of spirit, and capable of the most 
rapidly shifting and powerful expression, they had at one 
time a piercing and terrible aspect which made an oppo- 
nent quail beneath their gaze, and, at another, they were 
" as soft and tender as those of Pity herself." His voice, 
though not musical, was clear, distinct, and of remarkable 
compass and power. Its persuasive accents were as mild 
and mellifluous as those of a lute; but when rousing his 
countrymen to arms, it was like the war-blast of a trum- 
pet. His gesticulation, action, and facial expression, gave 
force to his most trivial observations. In one of his 
speeches, having occasion to declare that the consent of 
Great Britain was not necessary to create us a nation, — 
that " we were a nation long before the monarch of that 
little island in the Atlantic ocean gave his puny assent to 
it," — he accompanied the words with a gesture which 
strikingly impressed all who witnessed it. Rising on 
tiptoe, and half-closing his eyelids, as if endeavoring 
with extreme difficulty to draw a sight on some object 
almost too microscopic for vision, he pointed to a vast 
distance, and blew out the words " p-u-n-y assent" with 
his lips curled with unutterable contempt. In the same 
speech, having occasion to magnify this dot on the Atlantic 
into a formidable power, he found no difficulty in doing 
so by gestures almost equally significant. It is said that 
his pauses were eminently happy, being followed by a 
singular energy and significance of look that drove the 
thought home to the mind and heart. 

In arguing abstruse and knotty questions of law he 



1 



310 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

won no laurels. As we have seen, he acquired little legal 
lore in youth, and he never filled up the chasms in his 
learning in after-life. His most brilliant successes at 
the bar were won in jury trials. In these he was always 
at home. No performer that ever " swept the sounding- 
lyre" ever had a more imperial mastery over its strings, 
than Henry had over all the chords in the hearts of the 
twelve men in the box, when he sought to convince them. 
" The tones of his voice," says an able legal contemporary. 
" were insinuated into the feelings of his hearers in a 
manner that baffles description." His victories were due 

tly to this oratorical power, and partly to his wonder- 
L2 knowledge of the human heart, and his power of put- 
ting his reasoning into clear and pointed aphorisms. Often 

condensed the substance of a long argument into a 
short, pithy question, which was decisive of the case. 

A British reviewer has called attention to the striking 
resemblance which Henry's oratory bears to Lord Chat- 
ham's, notwithstanding the startling discrepancy between 
their birth, breeding, tastes, habits, and pursuits: "The 
one, a born member of the English aristocracy, — the other. 
a son of a Virginia farmer; the one educated at Eton 
and Oxford, — the other, picking up a little Latin gram- 
mar at a day-school; . . . the one, so fine a gentleman 
and so inveterate an actor, that, before receiving the most 
insignificant visitor, he was wont to call for his wig, and 
settle* himself in an imposing attitude, — the other, slouch- 
ing into the provincial parliament with his leather gaiters 
and shooting-jacket. But they meet in all the grand ele- 
mental points, — in fire, force, energy, and intrepidity — 
the sagacity that works by intuition, — the faculty of tak- 
ing in the entire subject at a glance, or lighting up a 



POLITICAL ORATOTCS — CLAY. 311 

whole question by a metaphor, — the fondness for Saxon 
words, short uninverted Saxon sentences, downright asser- 
tions, and hazardous apostrophes, — above all, in the singu- 
lar tact and felicity with which their dramatic (or rather 
melodramatic) touches were brought in." 

The greatest speech made in America this century was 
made by Daniel Webster in reply to Hayne. The greatest 
orator of this country, — Patrick Henry, perhaps, excepted, 
— we think was Henry Clay. In January, 1840, it was 
our good fortune to spend nearly two weeks at Washing- 
ton, mostly at the capitol, where we heard speeches 
all the leading men of the two houses. We need 
say that " there were giants in those days." It is eno 
to call over the names of Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Critt 
den, McDuffie, Preston, Douglas, in the Senate, and of 
John Quincy Adams, Cushing, Hoffman, Evans, and Mar- 
shall in the House, to show that the dwarfs in that Con- 
gress would be giants in the present. The first day we 
spent in the House, there was a stormy debate on the 
New Jersey question. The discussion grew so violent that 
members shook their fists at each other; invitations to 
" coffee and pistols" were given; and, to prevent a tumult, 
the House adjourned. This sent us to the Senate chamber, 
where our attention was at once arrested by a voice that 
seemed like the music of the spheres. It came from the 
lips of a tall, well-formed man, with a wide mouth, a 
flashing eye, and a countenance that revealed every change 
of thought within. It had a wonderful flexibility and 
compass, at one moment crashing upon the ear in thun- 
der-peals, and the next falling in music as soft as that of 
" summer winds a-wooing flowers." It rarely startled the 



312 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

hearer, however, with violent contrasts of pitch, and was 
equally distinct and clear when it rang out in trumpet 
tones, and when it sank to the lowest whisper. Every 
syllable, we had almost said, every letter, was perfectly 
audible, and as " musical as is Apollo's lute." There was 
not a word of rant, not one tone of vociferation; in the 
very climax of his passion he spoke deliberately, and his 
outpouring of denunciation was as slow and steady as the 
tread of Nemesis. He gesticulated all over. As he spoke, 
he stepped forward and backward with effect; and the 
nodding of his head, hung on a long neck, — his arms, 
hands, fingers, feet, and even his spectacles and blue hand- 
kerchief, aided him in debate. Who could it be? It took 
but a minute to answer the question. It was, — it could 
be no other than — Henry Clay. He had just begun an 
attack on another giant of the Senate; and the scene of 
intellectual fence that followed, during which they cut 
and thrust, lunged at each other and parried, some half- 
a-dozen times, is one of those that root themselves forever 
in the memory. Indeed, their very words have clung like 
burs to our recollection. 

Mr. Clay's opponent was a somewhat tall, slender-built, 
ghostly-looking man, about fifty years of age, erect and 
earnest, with an eye like a hawk's, and hair sticking up 
"like quills on the fretful porcupine." His voice was 
harsh, his gestures stiff and like the motions of a pump- 
handle. There was no ease, flexibility, grace, or charm, in 
his manner; yet there was something in his physiognomy 
and bearing, — his brilliant, spectral eyes, his colorless 
cheek, blanched with thought, and his compressed lips, — 
that riveted your attention as with hooks of steel. As 
his words struggled for a moment in his throat, and then 



POLITICAL OBATORS — CALHOUN. 313 

rushed out with tumultuous rapidity and vehemence, you 
were impressed with his apparent frankness, earnestness, 
and sincerity. As you listened to his plausible statements, 
it seemed incredible that this could be the great polit- 
ical sophist of America, — the hair-splitting logician and 
arch-nullifier, John C. Calhoun. Yet he, you were told, 
it was; and, as you scanned his features, you thought of 
Milton's lines on the hero of Paradise Lost: 

" His face 
Deep scars of thunder had entrenched; and Care 
Sat on his faded cheek; but under brows 
Of dauntless courage." 

Calhoun's style of speaking was generally colloquial. 
He talked like a merchant to his clerks, and used short 
Saxon words and proverbial phrases. Clay had just 
taunted him with a rumor that he had left the Opposi- 
tion ranks and struck hands with the Administration. 
He (Mr. Clay) " would like to know what compromises 
have been made between the honorable Senator from 
South Carolina and the 'Kinderhook fox'" (meaning Pres- 
ident Van Buren). Calhoun's reply, — his defiant look, 
his tones, — are as vivid to us as if we had seen and 
heard him yesterday. " No man," he began, " ought to be 
more tender on the subject of compromises than the hon- 
orable Senator from Kentucky." Then, alluding to the 
compromise effected by Clay in the Nullification crisis 
of 1830, he added: "The Senator from Kentucky was 
fiat on Ms back. I repeat it, sir; the Senator was flat 
on his back, and couldn't move. I wrote home to my 
friends in South Carolina half-a-dozen letters, saying that 
the honorable Senator from Kentucky was flat on his 
back, and couldn't move. I was his master on that occa- 
sion. I repeat it, sir; I was his master on that occasion. 
14 



314 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

He went to my school. He learned of me." Never shall 
we forget the consummate grace of manner, — the thrill- 
ing tones, — the electric effect of Clay's rejoinder. The two 
antagonists sat nearly at the extreme ends of the semi- 
circular rows of seats, — Calhoun sitting in the front row, 
on the President's right; Clay in the rear row, on his left. 
As we gazed oil these giant and veteran foes, — both 
steeped to the eye in fight, cunning of fence, masters of 
their weapons, and merciless in their use, we thought of 
the lines of Milton: 

" This day will pour down. 
If I conjecture aught, no drizzling shower. 
But rattling storms of arrows barbed with fire." 

" The honorable senator from South Carolina," said 
Clay, " says that I was flat on my back, and that he wrote 
home to his friends in South Carolina half-a-dozen letters 
stating that I was flat on my back, and couldn't move. 
Admirable evidence this in a court of law! First make 
an assertion, then quote your own letters to prove it! But 
the honorable senator says that he was my master on that 
occasion ! " As he said this, the speaker advanced down 
the aisle directly in front of Calhoun, and pointing to him 
with his quivering finger, said in tones and with looks in 
which were concentrated the utmost scorn and defiance, — 
"He my master! He my master!" he continued in louder 
tones, with his finger still pointed, and retreating back- 
ward, while his air and manner indicated the intensest 
abhorrence. "HE my master!'' he a third time cried, 
raising his voice to a still higher key, while he retreated 
backward to the very lobby; then, suddenly changing his 
voice from a trumpet peal to almost a whisper, which yet 
was distinctly audible in every nook and corner of the 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CLAY. 315 

Senate chamber, he added, — " Sir, I would not own him for 
my slave ! " For an instant, there was a hush of breath- 
less silence; then followed a tempest of applause, which 
for a while checked all further debate, and came near 
causing an expulsion of the spectators from the galle- 
ries. The Kentucky Senator then proceeded: "The Sen- 
ator from South Carolina further declares that I was not 
only flat on my back, but that another Senator (Mr. Web- 
ster) and the President had robbed me of my strength! 
Why, sir, I gloried in my strength. Flat on my back as 
the Senator says I was, he was indebted to me for that 
measure which relieved him of the difficulties " (Jackson's 
threats to arrest and hang him) " by which he was sur- 
rounded. Flat as I was, I was able to carry that Com- 
promise through the Senate in opposition to the gentle- 
man 11 (Mr. Webster) "who, the gentleman from South 
Carolina said, had supplanted me, and against his opposi- 
tion." In his closing remarks Calhoun taunted his opponent 
with his failure to obtain the Presidential nomination at 
the recent convention at Harrisburg (1839), to which the 
latter replied as follows: "As for me, Mr. President, my 
sands are nearly run, physically, and, if you please, polit- 
ically also; but I shall soon retire from the arena of public 
strife, and when I do so withdraw myself, it will be with 
the delightful consciousness of having served the best in- 
terests of my country, a consciousness of which the hon- 
orable Senator from South Carolina (pointing and shak- 
ing his finger at Calhoun) "with all his presumptuousness 
will never be able to deprive me." 

In the entire roll of distinguished orators, British and 
American, there is hardly one whose printed speeches give 
so inadequate an idea of his powers as do those of Henry 



316 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Clay. His eloquence was generally of a warm and popu- 
lar rather than of a strictly argumentative cast, and 
abound in just those excellences which lose their interest 
when divorced from the orator's manner and from the 
occasion that produced them, and in those faults that es- 
cape censure, only when it can be pleaded for them that 
they are the inevitable overflow of a mind too vividly at 
work to restrain the abundance of its current. It was 
the opinion of William Wirt that no orator could write 
out a faithful report of a speech which he had pronounced, 
except immediately after its delivery. It must be done, 
he said, while the mind is yet tossing with the storm, and 
before the waves have lost either their direction or their 
magnitude. But how can the storm and tempest of elo- 
quence, the waves of passion, the lightning of indignation, 
be conveyed on paper? Words may be written or printed: 
but who can print the air and manner that gave weight 
to a commonplace observation, and effect to a tawdry fig- 
ure? Who can undertake to represent in written forms 
of language, the flashing eye, the quivering lip, the ma- 
jestic bearing, the graceful gesture, the ever-changing and 
impassioned tones that thrill with an almost unearthly 
power to the inmost recesses of the soul? These are the 
life and spirit of all eloquence; and to judge of a speech 
which charmed all who heard it, by reading it in print 
after the charmer's voice is hushed, and at a different 
time, place, and occasion from those of its delivery, is as 
absurd as to judge of a beauty by looking at her skele- 
ton, or to express an opinion of a song without hearing 
the tune to which it owed nearly all its charm. 

Few orators of equal fame have begun their career with 
so slender an intellectual equipment as Henry Clay . His 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CLAY. 317 

father having died when he was but four years old, his 
mother, who was left in poverty with seven children, could 
do but little for his education. For three years he was 
placed under the charge of one Peter Deacon, an English- 
man, who taught in a log school-house which had no floor 
but the earth, and which was lighted by the open door 
only. Here he was instructed in reading, writing, and 
arithmetic, after which he was employed in a store at 
Richmond, Virginia, and thence transferred to a desk 
clerkship in the office of the high court of chancery in 
that State. Shortly after he was employed as an amanuen- 
sis by Chancellor Wythe, who, perceiving his talents and 
his fondness for books, urged him to study law, gave him 
the use of his library and directed his reading. So rapidly 
did he devour and assimilate his mental food, that it is 
said the Chancellor had only to name a book, and the next 
time he met his pupil he found him not only master of 
its contents, but " deeply versed in them, and extending 
his thoughts far beyond his instructors. The youth did 
not invoke the keepers of knowledge to let him into their 
secrets, but marched straight into their wide domains, as 
if to the possession of his native rights. 1 ' Many years 
after, when he had acquired a national fame, a plain old 
country gentleman gave the following toast at a Fourth- 
of-July dinner: "Henry Clay, — He and I were born 
close to the Slashes of old Hanover. He worked bare- 
footed, and so did I; he went to mill, and so did I; he 
was good to his mamma, and so was I. I know him 
like a book, and love him like a brother." 

In 1797, at the age of twenty, Clay removed from 
Virginia to Lexington, Kentucky, where he began the 
practice of law. Though penniless at first, he soon re- 



318 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

ceived his first fifteen shillings fee, and then, to use his 
own words, " immediately rushed into a successful and 
lucrative practice. 1 ' He was especially successful in crim- 
inal cases, often winning verdicts from juries by the 
magnetism of his oratory, in defiance of both law and 
evidence. Before his admission to the Kentucky bar, he 
joined a debating club, at a meeting of which, in his first 
attempt to speak, he broke down. Beginning his speech 
with " Gentlemen of the Jury," he was so confused by 
the perception of his mistake, that he could not go on. 
Encouraged by the members of the club, he began again 
with the same words; but, upon a third trial, he was 
more successful, and. gaining confidence as he proceeded, 
he burst the trammels of his youthful diffidence, and 
clothing his thoughts in appropriate language, was loudly 
and warmly cheered. With the exception of a single 
occasion, when his memory proved treacherous, a quarter 
of a century later, his thunder was never again "checked 
in mid volley," for lack of thoughts or language. On 
that occasion, as he was addressing the legislature of Vir- 
ginia, he began to quote the well-known lines of Scott, — 
" Lives there a man," etc., and suddenly stopped, unable to 
recall the rest. Closing his eyes, and pressing his forehead 
with the palm of his hand, to aid his recollection, he was 
fortunately supposed by the audience to be overcome by the 
power and intensity of his feelings. In a few moments the 
lines came to his lips, and as he pronounced them in 
thrilling tones, — 

"Lives there a man with soul so dead, 
Who never to himself hath said, 
This is my own, my native land? 11 — 

a profound sensation pervaded the assembly, which mani- 
fested itself, in man} r cases, by tears. 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CLAY. 319 

In person, Clay was tall and commanding, being six 
feet and one inch in stature, and was noted for the 
erect appearance he presented, whether standing, walking, 
or talking. The most striking features of his counte- 
nance were a high forehead, a prominent nose, an un- 
commonly large mouth, and blue eyes, which, though not 
particularly expressive when in repose, had an electrical 
appearance when kindled. His voice, as we have already 
said, was one of extraordinary compass, melody, and pow- 
er. From the " deep and dreadful sub-bass of the organ " 
to the most aerial warblings of its highest key, hardly a 
p ; ;^e or a stop was wanting. Like all magical voices, it 
had the faculty of imparting to the most familiar and 
commonplace expressions an inexpressible fascination; and 
in listening to its melting tones an enthusiastic listener 
might say: 

"Thy sweet words drop upon the ear as soft 
As rose leaves on a well; and I could listen 
As though the immortal melody of heaven 
Were wrought into one word,— that word a whisper, 
That whisper all I want from all I love. 11 

Probably no orator ever lived who, when speaking on a 
great occasion, was more completely absorbed in his 
theme. " I do not know how it is with others," he once 
said, "but, on such occasions, I seem to be unconscious 
of the external world. Wholly engrossed by the subject 
before me, I lose all sense of personal identity, of time, 
or of surrounding objects." It is no wonder that when an 
orator is thus abandoned, — when he becomes all feeling, 
from the core of his heart to the surface of his skin, and 
from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, gushing 
through every pore and expressed through every organ, — 
that his sway over his hearers should be complete. 



320 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

We have no space for extracts from any of day's 
great speeches, such as those on South American Inde- 
pendence, Internal Improvement, the Sub-Treasury Scheme, 
etc. etc.; and will, therefore, conclude this sketch with a 
passage from an address made to the citizens of Lexing- 
ton, Ky., in 1843, after his first retirement from Congress. 
He was then in his sixty-sixth year, and, in defending 
himself from some attacks made upon his character, said: 
"Fellow citizens: I now am an old man — quite an old 
man." Here he bent himself downward. "But yet it 
will be found I am not too old to vindicate my princi- 
ples, to stand by my friends, or to defend myself," — rais- 
ing his voice louder and louder, at each successive mem- 
ber of the sentence, and elevating his person in a most 
impressive manner. He then proceeded thus: "It so 
happens that I have again located myself in the practice 
of my profession, in an office within a few rods of the 
one which I occupied, when, more than forty years ago, I 
first came among you, an orphan and a stranger, and 
your fathers took me by the hand, and made me what I 
am. I feel like an old stag, which has been long coursed 
by the hunters and the hounds, through brakes and bri- 
ers, and o'er distant plains, and has at last returned him- 
self to his ancient lair, to lay him down and die. And 
yet the vile curs of party are barking at my heels, and 
the blood-hounds of personal malignity are aiming at my 
throat. I scorn and defy them, as I ever did.'' As he 
uttered these last words, he raised himself, says an eye- 
witness, to his most erect posture, and lifted up his hands 
and arms above his head, till his tall person seemed to 
have nearly doubled its height. The effect was over- 
whelming, beyond all power of description. 



POLITICAL ORATORS — CALHOUN. 321 

The leading faculty of Calhoun's mind was his power 
of analysis. In the ability to examine a complex idea, 
to resolve it into its simplest elements, he had no supe- 
rior. Next to this, his most striking characteristic was 
the depth of his convictions. Though you differed from 
every word he uttered, you were persuaded of his pro- 
found belief in what he said, and his willingness to stake 
life and honor on each sentence. No man ever cared 
less for the graces and polish of the schools. Intensely 
earnest, he cared only to make himself understood; and 
while the periods of Clay glittered " like polished lances 
in a sunny forest, 1 ' Calhoun, in his vehemence, bit off the 
last syllables, and sometimes eat up whole sentences in 
the fury of his enunciation. 

Napoleon said of La Place, when the latter was in 
office, that he carried into the discharge of his duties 
the spirit of infinitesimal quantities; and so it has been 
said of Calhoun, that he never forgot the refinements 
and subtleties of his peculiar metaphysics. His speeches, 
his letters, his dissertations, though filling six large vol- 
umes, are but repetitions of the same primary ideas put 
through the, same logical mill. Clay was chivalric, im- 
pulsive, poetic, enthusiastic, — full of coruscations of wit, 
and flashes of fancy; "Webster, besides the Doric propriety 
of his diction, arrested your attention by the ponderous 
ring in his weighty sentences, as they fell like trip-ham- 
mers upon the casques of his antagonists; but Calhoun 
was always dry, direct, intensely ratiocinative, — moving 
forward, like Babbage's calculating machine, from one nu- 
meral to another, till the net quotient, or sum total, 
was evolved." There is an abundance of metaphysical 
subtlety, of hard reasoning, and " obstinate questionings," 



322 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

in his speeches, but no sap, nothing juicy or unctuous, 
none of the poetry of eloquence. He is not one of those 
speakers 

•'Whose thoughts possess us like a passion, 
Through every limb and the whole heart; whose words 
Haunt us as eagles haunt the mountain air, 1 ' 

suggesting a thousand ideas and sentiments which they 
do not express. One absorbing passion seems to have 
taken possession of his soul, and to have overpowered all 
the rest. As Charles Lamb said of the Quakers, that, if 
they could, they would paint the universe in drab, so it 
may be said of Calhoun, that the ideal of his life was to 
gather statistics of the United States, and work them up 
into theories of State Rights and Nullification. 

Clay's words, when assailing an enemy, were usually 
courteous and polished, while Calhoun's were fierce, blunt, 
and rudely terrible. The one hit his man with a keen 
rapier, like a courtier of the old regime ; the other knocked 
him down with a sledge-hammer, like a Scandinavian 
giant. Clay allows you to die, like Lord Chester, in a 
becoming attitude; while Calhoun breaks your bones, and 
leaves you sprawling on the floor. The one stabs you 
with a smile; the other smashes you with a frown. Clay 
is even more dangerous than Calhoun, as the graceful 
leopard is, perhaps, an antagonist more to be feared than 
the grizzly bear. To the noble Kentuckian we might 
apply, with a slight change, the lines of Bulwer: 

"Fierce, haughty, rash, irregularly great. 
Next Stanley comes, the Rupert of debate;" 

and we might add, too, that, like the warrior to whom 
Noma chants her witch-song, seldom 

" Lies he still, through sloth or fear. 
When point and edge are glittering near." 



' POLITICAL ORATORS — WEBSTER. 323 

Many great men "shame their worshipers" on a near 
approach. Their dwarfish bodies give the lie to their 
intellectual pretensions; their souls are physiognomically 
slandered by their bodies. But whoever looked upon 
Daniel Webster, with his massive, Herculean frame, his 
beetling brows, deep-set, searching black eyes, and imperial 
port, felt instantaneously that a Titan stood before him. 
In his voice, in his step, and in his bearing, there was a 
grandeur that took the imagination by storm. " Since 
Charlemagne," said Theodore Parker, " I think there has 
not been such a grand figure in all Christendom.'" When 
Thorwaldsen, the Danish sculptor, saw the cast of his 
bust in Powers's studio at Rome, he mistook it for a head 
of Jupiter. Sydney Smith was astonished at this speci- 
men of "American physical degeneracy." Carlyle, speak- 
ing of his large, dark, and cavernous eyes, overhung by 
shaggy brows, said that, when in repose, they were "like 
blast furnaces blown out." Nature had set her seal of 
greatness visibly upon him, and his achievements in the 
Senate and the forum, in the closet and before masses of 
his fellow-citizens, did not belie the promise of his god- 
like physiognomy. Doubtless Calhoun had a more acute 
and metaphysical mind, and could divide a line more 
nicely " 'twixt south and southwest side"; Clay had a 
more electric or magnetic nature, and showed far keener 
sagacity in divining public sentiment, and in sweeping 
the strings of popular feeling; but in sheer intellectual 
might, — in that comprehensiveness of vision which sees 
all the sides of a subject and judges it in all its relations, 
— in that largeness and weight of utterance which give 
the greatest impressiveness to everything that one says, 
and in hard logic, which links conclusion to conclusion 



324 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

like a chain of iron, — neither Clay, nor Calhoun, nor any- 
other American, was ever equal to Webster. He was em- 
phatically the orator of the understanding, and for this 
reason, because he spoke to the head rather than to the 
heart, — because his qualities were those imperial ones that 
compel admiration, rather than win love, — he was never 
a favorite of the populace. The young men of the coun- 
try worshiped him, and the thinking men looked up to 
him with admiration, but generally he was the pride of 
the people rather than their idol. 

It is a notable fact that Webster, like Bacon, was a 
sickly child, and but for that reason might never have 
been sent to college. It is a curious fact also, that, when 
at the academy in Exeter, he was afflicted with such an 
extreme shyness that he took no part in the declama- 
tions. Many pieces were committed to memory and re- 
hearsed again and again by him in his room: but when 
his name was called in the school-room, and all eyes 
were fastened upon him, he was glued to his seat. Upon 
entering college, however, he became at once an easy and 
impressive speaker and debater, and when he took the 
floor for the first time in Congress he sprang by one 
bound to the very front rank of American parliamentary 
debaters. His speech was so weighty, luminous, and con- 
vincing, that Chief Justice Marshall prophesied his futur 
eminence. With his advent at Washington, a new schoc 
of oratory, — now known throughout the country as "th 
Websterian, ,, — was formed, for even thus early his ora 
tory had mainly all the qualities which characterized i 
in his riper years. In its Demosthenian simplicity and 
strength, it was alike opposed to the flowery sentimental- 
ism of Wirt and to the frigid vehemence and pedantic 



POLITICAL ORATORS — WEBSTER. 325 

classicality of Pinkney. His" style was Doric, not Corin- 
thian, reminding one by its massive strength of the shafts 
hewn from the granite hills of his native state. He was 
at this time, as he continued to be throughout his whole 
subsequent life, the personification of the understanding, 
as distinguished from the intuitive reason and the crea- 
tive imagination. The basis of his intellect was an un- 
common common sense. He did not dart to his concha 
sions with the swift discernment of the eagle-eyed Clay, 
but won them by sheer force of thinking. He concen- 
trated all his mental faculties upon a confused and per- 
plexing mass of facts, and it was at once resolved and 
luminous, as under the powerful vision of the telescope 
the milky way breaks into stars. He had no sophisms 
or verbal dexterities, no intellectual juggleries. His pow- 
er before the jury, court, senate, and audience, lay not 
in his intellectual subtlety, or displays of feeling and im- 
agination, but in his appeals to facts. Mr. Parker, in 
his " Golden Age of American Oratory," tells of a case 
about two car- wheels, in which, by a sentence and a 
look, Webster crushed one of Choate's subtlest and most 
fine-spun arguments to atoms. The wheels, which to 
common eyes looked as if made from the same model, 
Choate endeavored to show, by a train of hair-splitting 
reasoning and by a profound discourse on " the fixation 
of points," had hardly a shadow of essential resemblance. 
" But," said Webster, and his great eyes opened wide and 
black, as he stared at the big twin wheels before him, 
"gentlemen of the jury, there they are, — look at 'em!" 
and as he thundered out these words, in tones of vast 
volume, the distorted wheels shrunk into their original 
similarity, and the cunning argument on " the fixation of 



326 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

points " died a natural death. Webster did not excel in 
abstract reasoning, — at least, it was not his forte, as it 
was Calhoun's; it was when, Antseus-like, he planted his 
feet upon the earth, that you felt his power. His grasp 
of facts, and skill in arranging them, were alike prodi- 
gious. His understanding swept over the whole extent 
of a subject, classified and systematized its tangled de- 
tails, discerned its laws, and made it so luminous, that 
the simplest intellect could apprehend it. He illuminated 
dark themes, obscured by sophistry, with such a blaze of 
light that the hearer, finding them so transparent, un- 
derrated the difficulty overcome. Like Lord Mansfield, he 
was distinguished for his skill in statement. His narra- 
tive of the facts in a case was itself a demonstration. 

Giant-like as was his intellect, it was naturally slug- 
gish and heavy, and required, as we have said, the stimulus 
of a great occasion or a great antagonist to call forth its 
slumbering power. He was like a mighty line-of-battle 
ship, which is not easily set in motion, but whose guns, 
when she is once fairly engaged, crush everything opposed 
to her. On a small subject, he was dull. If required to 
speak at a public dinner, or on a parade day, he floundered 
" like a whale in a frog- pond.' 1 As Grattan said of Flood, 
" put a distaff in his hand, and, like Hercules, he makes 
sad work of it; but give him a thunderbolt, and he has 
the arm of a Jove." We heard him speak at the Harvard 
Centennial Celebration in 1838. at which .two thousand 
alumni were gathered, and we are sure that he wearied 
all who listened to him. Legare, Bancroft, Story, all sur- 
passed him. It was not merely because he lacked the 
necessary stimulus that he failed on these occasions, but 
because he had too much intellectual intesrritv for this kind 



POLITICAL ORATORS — WEBSTER. 327 

of sham oratory; he had no taste for exalting molehills 
into mountains, or killing humming-birds with Paixhans. 
In his attempts at humor he was sometimes successful, but 
oftener reminded one of an elephant gambolling, or, "to 
make" men "sport, wreathing his lithe proboscis." Per- 
haps his best effort in this line was in a speech at 
Rochester, New York: 

" Men of Rochester, I am glad to see you, and I am glad to see your noble 
city. Gentlemen, I saw your falls, which I am told are one hundred and fifty 
feet high. That is a very interesting fact. Gentlemen, Rome had her Caesar, 
her Scipio. her Brutus; but Rome, in her proudest days, never had a waterfall 
one hundred and fifty feet high ! Gentlemen, Greece had her Pericles, her De- 
mosthenes, and her Socrates; but Greece, in her palmiest days, never had a 
waterfall one hundred and fifty feet high ! Men of Rochester, go on. No people 
ever lost their liberties, who had a waterfall one hundred a-nd fifty feet high ! " 

One of his best witticisms was a reply made to his 
landlady at Washington, Mrs. Seaton, who said to him one 
day, when he came home late from the Cabinet, that he 
looked fatigued and worried. He had been revising Presi- 
dent Harrison's inaugural, which was brimful of pedantic 
allusions to Roman history, and especially to the Roman 
proconsuls, which the old hero, in spite of Webster's pro- 
test, had been obstinately bent on retaining. " I really 
hope, 1 ' saia^ Mrs. Seaton, " that • nothing has happened." 
"You would think something had happened," Webster 
replied, " if you knew what I nave done. I have killed 
seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts, every one 
of them." In debate Webster was- quick at retort. If it 
was a personal insult that roused the slumbering lion, his 
roar of rage was appalling, and the spring and the death- 
blow that followed, were like lightning in their suddenness. 
But it was on momentous occasions, when great public 
interests were at stake, that the full might of his intellect 
was visible. When feebler men, awed by the darkness of 



328 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

the political sky, fled for shelter from the tempest, he 
rushed forth exultingly to the elemental war, with all his 
faculties stimulated to their utmost, When the thunders 
of Nullification muttered in the distance, he coolly watched 
the coming storm; and when they burst, he bared his head 
to the bolts, like the mammoth of tradition, shaking them 
off as they fell. No man ever spoke, in whose utterances, 
even the simplest, the power of a great personality was 
more deeply felt. It has been justly said that u the ap- 
pearance of his blue coat with its gilt buttons, and his 
buff vest, was always as inspiring to his friends, and as 
dispiriting to his enemies, as the gray overcoat and cocked 
hat of Napoleon. Wellington estimated the presence of 
Napoleon on the battle-field as equivalent to a reinforce- 
ment of fifty thousand troops (on his side), and the moral 
grandeur and influence of Webster were similar/' 

No triumph that he ever won seemed to tax all his 
powers or to drain the secret fountains of his strength. 
Behind the strongest arguments he put forward, there 
was always a vast reserved force. The heavy guns thun- 
dered forth, sending shot and shell direct to the mark, 
but behind them you saw the massed supports. It was 
the advanced guard only that was in action; the Imperial 
Guard was still kept back. It has been said of Edward 
Everett that he ;i seemed to spend himself upon his pe- 
riods, while Webster stood behind his periods/' You felt 
as you listened to him that the man was greater than 
his words, superior to his work. The very fact that his 
temperament was torpid and sluggish, making him ordi- 
narily dull and unimpassioned, rendered his vehemence 
the more impressive. If it took long to light up the 
fires in his vast intellectual furnaces, they burned with 



POLITICAL ORATORS — WEBSTER. 329 

proportional fury, and consumed the hardest substances 
in their blaze. 

Webster rarely attempted pathos, but when he did so, 
never failed to unseal the fountains of feeling. His 
celebrated apostrophe to Massachusetts, in the speech of 
1830, made hoary men weep like children; and when 
he closed his argument in the Dartmouth College case, 
so overpowering was the pathos that even the grave 
judges of the Supreme Court could not check their tears. 
There was a vein of sadness in his nature, which tinges 
nearly all his utterances, and is visible, we think, in his 
grave, severe, and somewhat solemn face, furrowed and 
lined " like the side of a hill where the torrent hath 
been." The countenance is that of a man on whom 
" the burden of the unintelligible world " has weighed 
more heavily than on ordinary men. Yet he loved to 
unbend, at times, in the presence of his friends. After 
his great Plymouth and Adams and Jefferson orations, he 
was " as playful as a kitten," says Mr. Ticknor. Web- 
ster was not a learned man. He read much, not many 
books. A few authors, Shakspeare, Milton, and Burke, 
he seems to have read till their ideas were held in his 
own mind in constant solution. His great speeches, es- 
pecially the reply to Hayne, are adorned with felicitous 
quotations and applications from the two poets, and the 
germs .of some of his finest thoughts and metaphors may 
be found in Burke. There are great generals who can 
handle a force of ten thousand men so as to make them 
more effective than fifty thousand directed by other chiefs; 
and so it was with the facts and ideas marshalled and 
hurled against an adversary by Webster. In jury trials 

he culled and grouped the essential testimony of his wit- 
14* 



330 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

nesses, put their words into a solid mass, and then 
"hurled it home in comparatively few sentences, — few, 
but thunderbolts." 

Webster was not a rhetorician like Everett and Wirt. 
Though nice in his choice of words, he was not, like Pink- 
ney and Choate, constantly racking dictionaries to obtain 
an affluence of synonyms. Though possessing an ample 
command of expression, he rarely wastes a word. He 
once criticised Watts for saying in a hymn that an angel 
moved " with most amazing speed." The line, he said, 
conveyed no sense. " It would amaze us," he added, " to 
see an oyster move a mile a day: it would not amaze us 
to see a greyhound run a mile a minute." No one of 
our great orators had a greater horror of epithets and 
adjectives, or more heartily despised all grandiloquence or 
sesquipedalia verba. For all cant and rhetorical trickery, 
— for all "bunkum" talk and windy declamation about 
" the shades of Hampden and Sidney " and " the eternal 
rights of man." — for cheap enthusiasms and spread-eagles 
generally. — he had a supreme scorn. Few orators of equal 
imagination have so few figures of speech. There are 
more metaphors in ten pages of Burke than in all of 
Webster's works. In discussing a subject he loses no time 
in circumlocutions or digressions. He uses no scattering 
fowling-piece that sends its shot around the object to be 
hit, but plants his rifle-ball in the very centre of the tar- 
get. Commonly he prepared himself with conscientious 
care for his speeches. — not by writing them out, but by 
thinking over and over what he had to say. all the while 
mentally facing his audience. In many passages, no doubt, 
the very language was pre-chosen, — selected with the nicest 
discrimination. — especially on critical occasions, and in the 



POLITICAL ORATORS — WEBSTER. 331 

closing paragraphs, in which were condensed the very pith 
and marrow of his entire argument. It is not easy to 
believe tha.t the gorgeous bursts of eloquence, the " daz- 
zling fence " of rhetoric, the exquisite quotations and 
allusions, and the compact arguments, in the reply to 
Hayne, were all in impromptu language. We must re- 
member, however, that, in preparing his speeches for the 
press, he corrected them with merciless severity, and some- 
times used the tile till it weakened instead of polishing. 
Starr King observes that the reply to Hayne, unlike the 
"Oration on the Crown," which is veined with the fiercest 
invective, is free from taunts and sarcasms. " It is not 
only crushing, but Christian. " Certain hearers of the 
speech, however, report one personal thrust which never 
appeared in print. " Sir," said Webster, in tones that 
shook the Senate chamber, "the Senator said that he 
should carry the war into Africa, — if God gave him the 
power. But, sir," said Webster, glowering down upon 
Hayne with a look of ineffable scorn, " God has not given 
him the power. I put it to the gentleman, God has not 
given him the power." It is rarely, however, that the lan- 
guage of scorn thus falls from Webster's lips. He neither 
mocks his antagonist like Gavazzi, nor insults him like 
O'Connell, but appeals directly to the intellect of the 
hearer, and is more anxious to convince than to excite. 

Webster was as far as possible from being an orator 
of the Macaulay school, the members of which pickle and 
preserve their sentences for use. His forte was in argu- 
ment, not in epigram; and he certainly would never have 
thought of writing revised editions of a phrase, like Sheri- 
dan. Even when he had conned a speech most carefully, 
he was more than once lifted out of his grooves, and 



332 ORATORY -ANT) ORATORS. 

borne upon the heaving ground swell of his passion into 
extemporaneous splendor. An able English critic, who 
complains that Webster is not uniformly refined in his 
language, admits that the style of his speeches is of gran- 
ite strength and texture, and therefore is not of the fee- 
ble order which depends upon the collocation of an epithet, 
— that, as Erskine said of Fox's speeches, " in their most 
imperfect reliques the bones of a giant are to be discov- 
ered." 

Webster's manner in speaking was usually calm, quite 
the opposite of Clay's or Calhoun's. He was the most de- 
liberate of our great orators, expressing himself in meas- 
ured sentences with great economy of words. His voice 
was deep-toned, like that of a great bell or organ, yet 
was musical, and well adapted to his sinewy Anglo-Saxon 
words and weighty thoughts. On great occasions, when 
the whole man was roused, its swell and roll, we are told, 
struck upon the ears of the spell-bound audience in deep 
and melodious cadence, as waves upon the shore of the 
" far-resounding sea." Except in moments of high excite- 
ment, he had little action, — an occasional gesture with the 
right hand being all. In his law-arguments, he was still 
more sparing of gestures; his keen, deep-set eye glancing, 
his speaking countenance and distinct utterance, with an 
occasional emphatic inclination of the body, being the only 
means by which he urged home his arguments. The vast 
mass of the man did much to make his words impressive. 
"He carried men's minds, and overwhelmingly pressed his 
thought upon them, with the immense current of his phys- 
ical energy." 

Of all our great orators Daniel Webster was the freest 
from egotism, while at the same time he manifested a 



POLITICAL ORATORS — WEBSTER. 333 

magnificent self-reliance, based on a just estimate of his 
own powers. When Hayne made his fierce assault upon 
New England, it was feared by many, even of Mr. Web- 
ster's friends, that it could not be answered. On the 
evening before his reply, he read over to Edward Everett 
some of the points which he intended to make, in so dry, 
business-like a way that the latter expressed a fear that 
he was not aware of the magnitude of the occasion. But 
it was speedily evident that he was equal to the exigency 
— that his calmness was not that of indifference, but the 
repose of conscious power. It was the hush that precedes 
the storm. As Mr. Iredell, of North Carolina, said of his 
first speech, the lion had been started, but " they had not 
yet heard his roar or felt his claws." While the New 
Englanders in Washington were quaking with fear, their 
champion, never more playful or in higher spirits than 
that evening, slept that night, and " slept soundly." " So," 
says Everett, in one of his happiest passages, " the great 
Conde slept on the eve of the battle of Rocroi ; so Alex- 
ander the Great slept on the eve of the battle of Arbela; 
and so they awoke to deeds of immortal fame. As I saw 
him in the evening (if I may borrow an illustration from 
his favorite amusement), he was as unconcerned and free 
in spirit as some here present have seen him, while floating 
in his fishing-boat along a hazy shore, gently rocking on 
the tranquil tide, dropping his line here and there with 
the varying fortune of his sport. The next morning he 
was some mighty admiral, dark and terrible; casting the 
long shadow of his frowning tiers far over the sea, that 
seemed to sink beneath him; his broad pennant streaming 
at the main, the stars and stripes at the fore, the mizzen 
and the peak; and bearing down like a tempest upon his 



334 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

antagonist, with all his canvas strained to the wind, and 
all his thunders roaring from his broadsides." A defeat 
so terrible was never, except once, known before. It was 
when the Archangel drove Satan from heaven, and 

" With the sound 
Of torrent floods, or of a numerous host. 
He on his impious foes right onward drove. 
Gloomy as night." 

It seems almost incredible that this greatest and most 
memorable of American speeches, lasting six hours, dur- 
ing which every ke}' in the entire gamut of eloquence 
was sounded, — abounding in argument, logic, wit, irony, 
poetry, pathos, and passion, — almost every page of which 
has been declaimed to death in colleges and academies, — 
should have been extempore. Into half a sheet of letter 
paper, of which the brief consisted, were condensed all 
the bolts of this marvellous reply. There is no doubt 
that the orator had, in one sense, been long prepared for 
the assault which he repelled with such crushing energy. 
He had long ago weighed and answered in his own mind 
the arguments for Nullification, and like the war-horse of 
the Scriptures, who " paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth 
in his strength," he had awaited the onset of the enemy 
with a stern and impatient joy. Indeed, he himself has 
left on record his feelings when he rose to reply. Not 
until he took the floor, and saw the concourse, and felt 
the hush, did he feel the slightest trepidation. Then for 
an instant the responsibility of his position rushed upon 
and nearly unmanned him. But after this first dizzy 
moment was over, during which the sea of faces whirled 
around him, — after a single recollection how his brother 
had fallen dead, a year before in a similar climax of ex- 
citement, — he subdued, by a strong effort, his trepidation ; 



POLITICAL ORATORS — WEBSTER. 335 

" my feet," he says, " felt the floor again, they seemed 
rooted like rocks, and all that I had ever read or thought 
or acted in literature, in history, in law, in politics, seemed 
to unroll before me in glowing panorama, and then it was 
easy, if I wanted a thunderbolt, to reach out and take it 
as it went smoking by" 

Some of Webster's indiscriminate eulogists are fond of 
comparing him with Burke. The difference was, that 
one had the very highest order of talent, the other had 
genius. Burke was, like the poet, "of imagination all 
compact," and to this he added profound culture, earnest- 
ness, and moral sensibility; Webster's forte was in dialec- 
tics, in calm, masterly exposition, in massive strength of 
style, in all the qualities that give men leadership in 
debate. As another has said, " Where Webster reasoned, 
Burke philosophized; where Webster was serene, equable, 
ponderous, dealing his blows like an ancient catapult, 
Burke was clamorous, fiery, multitudinous, rushing for- 
ward like his own 'whirlwind of cavalry.' . . . Webster 
was the Roman temple, stately, solid, massive; Burke, the 
Gothic cathedral, fantastic, aspiring, and many-colored. 
The sentences of Webster roll along like the blasts of 
the trumpet on the night air; those of Burke are like the 
echoes of an organ in some ancient minster. Webster 
advances, in his heavy logical march, and his directness of 
purpose, like a Csesarean legion, close, firm, serried, square; 
Burke, like an oriental procession, with elephants and tro- 
phies, and the pomp of banners." Webster never could 
have delivered any one of the speeches of Burke on the 
trial of Hastings, blazing as they do with the splendors 
of a gorgeous rhetoric; nor could Burke, on the other 
hand, have made that overwhelming extempore reply to 



336 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Hayne, so full and running over with mingled logic, wit, 
irony, satire, persuasion, and pathos. 

Among the various classifications of public speakers, 
one of the broadest and most natural is that of orators 
and rhetoricians, — natural orators and orators who have 
become such by art. Since the first class employ more or 
less art, and the latter have occasional bursts of inspira- 
tion, these divisions, like all others, partially overlap 
or cross each other, yet it is none the less a just one, 
which will suggest itself to every student of eloquence: 
The natural, or born orator, speaks from an irresistible 
impulse, a necessity, an insatiable craving of his nature. 
His soul is stirred to its depths by the thoughts and feel- 
ings that clamor for utterance, and he can no more check 
their expression than one can check a mountain torrent 
in its flow. His emotions, like Banquo's ghost, will not 
"down" at his bidding; he is rather acted upon than act- 
ing, and in the height of his frenzy, has no more choice 
as to what he shall utter than the Sibyl who utters the 
oracles she is inspired to pronounce. Even when such 
an orator, on a great occasion, <; cons and learns by rote " 
his ideas and language, he finds it almost impossible to 
make them run in the groove which he had previously 
prepared. When the storm is up within him, he is swept 
onward, in spite of himself, in directions of which he had 
not dreamed: some of the arguments and illustrations 
which he had most carefully pre-studied are forgotten,- 
and others more vivid and effective crowd upon him ; 
sentiments, ideas, and fancies, which he was incapable of 
originating in his cooler moments, flash incessantly on 
his brain; the whole man is transfigured to the hearers, 



POLITICAL ORATORS — EVERETT. 337 

and, as they listen to his tones, it seems " as if the trum- 
pet-stop of a grand organ were opened, and the hand of 
a wizard coursed along its keys." Not so with the rhet- 
orician, — the speaker who owes his power to art. He is 
not stung and goaded into eloquence by the very impulses 
of his being. He is never troubled with thoughts that 
are a torment to him, till they are wreaked upon ex- 
pression, and reflected from the faces and echoed from 
the throats of his hearers. His eloquence does not " come 
like the outbreaking of a fountain upon the earth, or the 
bursting forth of volcanic fires." With him art is not 
merely an aid to oratory, by which it is decorated and 
embellished; it is the very fountain from which it flows. 
He has cultivated and enriched his mind with the most 
sedulous care. He has drunk at the fountains of modern 
literature, and distilled the sweetness of the Greek and 
Roman springs. Not only his thoughts and illustrations, 
but his very words and tones are carefully pre-studied, and 
every look and gesture is rehearsed before a glass. All 
his climaxes and cadences, his outbursts of passion and 
his explosions of grief, are practiced beforehand, and not 
a look nor an attitude, not a modulation nor an accent, 
is left to the inspiration of the moment. 

To this class of speakers belongs Edward Everett, the 
most consummate rhetorician that America has yet pro- 
duced.* Probably not one of our public speakers was ever 
more conscientious, not to say finical, in his preparation 
for the rostrum. Nothing with him is left to chance or 
improvisation; all his oratorical flights, as well as the less 
ambitious parts of his discourse, are made with " malice 

* For convenience we have placed Everett in the list of " Political Orators," 
though he more properly ranks as a platform speaker. 
15 



338 ORATORY A>y T D ORATORS. 

prepense and aforethought.' 1 Not a word but has been 
fitted into its place with the precision of each stone in a 
mosaic; not an epithet but has been weighed in the hair- 
balance of the most fastidious taste; not a period but has 
been polished and repolished, and modulated with the 
nicest art, till it is totus teres atque rotundas, and mu- 
sical as the tones of a flute. Even his attitudes and ges- 
tures have all been carefully practiced in his study, and 
their precise effect calculated with a critical eye. One 
of his tricks of delivery was to provide himself before- 
hand with certain physical objects to which he designed 
to refer, and hold them at the proper moment to the 
eyes of his audience. Thus, in delivering the magnificent 
passage upon Webster, which we have quoted on page 333, 
as Everett pealed out the words, " his broad pennant 
streaming at the main," he caught up from the table, as 
if unconsciously, an elegant flag of the Union, and waved 
it to and fro amid the shouts of his ravished and en- 
thusiastic hearers. At another time, in an agricultural 
address, having dwelt in glowing terms upon a New- 
England product which he declared was brighter and 
better than California gold, he produced and brandished 
before the eyes of the people, at the moment when curi- 
osity was on tiptoe, a golden ear of corn. Again, to 
illustrate a remark, he, on another occasion, put his 
finger in a tumbler of water, and let a drop trickle off; 
and, yet again, in an academic address, having spoken of 
the electric wire which was destined to travel the deep- 
soundings of the ocean, among the bones of lost Armadas, 
he " realized" the description by displaying an actual piece 
of the Submarine Atlantic Cable. Proceeding to compare 
that wire, murmuring the thought of America through 



POLITICAL ORATORS — EVERETT. 339 

leagues of ocean, to the printed page, which, he declared, 
was a yet greater marvel, since it murmured to us the 
thought of Homer through centuries, — he held up to view 
a small copy of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." 

In reading Everett's speeches, you feel that they are 
the highest triumph of art, — the acme of literary finish, 
— rhetoric in "its finest and most absolute burnish." In 
them we have his thoughts " thrice winnowed," the ripest 
and best products of his varied scholarship and his rare 
genius. It may be said of his oratorical muse, as of Mil- 
ton's Eve, that " grace is in all her steps." The only 
drawback to this kind of oratory is, that it is too apt to 
lack abandonment, that self-forgetfulness and fervor which 
are the soul of oratory, and without which, though it may 
tickle the ear, it does not thrill the heart. It may daz- 
zle you by its flashes of heat lightning, but it never 
strikes you with the thunderbolt. It is like the music of 
a fine barrel-organ compared with the ever-varying har- 
monies of the orchestra. Every one knows that much of 
the power of an orator depends upon those glowing 
thoughts and expressions which are struck out in the ex- 
citement and heat of debate, and which even the speaker 
himself is unable afterward to recall. Perhaps the larger 
part of the poetry of eloquence is of this character. There 
is a secret magic in the " electric kindling of life between 
two or more minds," in the velocities and contagious ardor 
of debate, which arms a man with new forces, as well as 
with new dexterity in wielding old ones, — suggesting 
thoughts, arguments, analogies, and illustrations, which 
would never have occurred to him in the stillness of the 
study. De Quincey has remarked that great organists find 
the same effect of inspiration, the same result of power 



340 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

creative and revealing, in the mere movement and velocity 
of their own voluntaries, like the heavenly wheels of Mil- 
ton, throwing off fiery flakes and bickering flames; these 
impromptu torrents of music create rapturous Jioriture, 
beyond all capacity in the artist to register, or afterward 
to imitate. All the great works of eloquence are, or ap- 
pear, like those bronze statues which the artist has cast 
at a single sitting. 

Everett is an example of all that can be done by mere 
rhetorical and elocutionary training to charm and per- 
suade; but no one can doubt that, had nature framed 
him with a more emotional nature, his achievements 
would have been greater. He has the art and mech- 
anism of eloquence, rather than its genius; he is the 
Kemble rather than the Kean of the rostrum. One 
of his friendly critics quotes the saying of a shrewd old 
lady concerning John Foster's nominally extemporaneous 
prayers, that they were " Foster's Stand-up Essays," and 
adds that, triumphant and charming as these orations are, 
the hearer never forgets that they are Everett's " Stand- 
up Essays." It is well known that their author failed in 
Congress, — not because his speeches were too fine, but be- 
cause they were not sufficiently condensed for a parlia- 
mentary assembly, and because they were rather eloquent 
pieces of writing than speeches in the proper sense of the 
term. There is a colossal grandeur and a massive strength 
in Webster's speeches that remind you of an Egyptian 
pyramid; the S3 r mmetry and classic elegance of Everett 
call to mind the Greek temple. Everett has no pithy, 
pointed phrases, like Webster's, in which a whole argu- 
ment is packed. Choate well said: "Webster's phrases 
are much more telling than Everett's; they run through 



POLITICAL ORATORS — EVERETT. 341 

the land like coin." After all, it is the acer spiritus et 
vis that is the first element of oratory. Some Frenchman 
says: "V eloquence continuee ennuie v '; and it is true that, 
ere long, the honeyed phrases of the mellifluous orator 
grow wearisome; the flowery style that is mistaken for 
poetry palls upon us. Again, Everett never impresses you, 
as do Webster and Clay, with the feeling that the man 
is more puissant than his periods. His expressions do not 
suggest a region of thought, a dim vista of imagery, an 
oceanic depth of feeling, beyond what is compassed by his 
sentences. He never seems to struggle with language in 
order to wrest from it words enough for his wealth of 
thought. It is not an example of " Strength, half leaning 
on its own right arm," but of Beauty endowed with every 
natural and artificial charm. 

Nevertheless, let us not fail to do justice to Mr. Ever- 
ett's real merits, for he has many and grexti ones. The 
great charm of his orations does not lie in any one trait, 
but in their symmetry and finish, the proofs they exhibit 
on every page that they are the products of the most 
careful culture. The style seems to us the very perfec- 
tion of the epideictic, or demonstrative style. Artificial it 
undoubtedly is, and occasionally, though rarely, may be- 
tray the artist's tooling; but it is a style formed by the 
most assiduous painstaking, and polished by a taste as 
exquisitely sensitive as a blind man's touch. If, — as it 
has been well said, — it does not snatch a grace beyond 
the reach of art, it certainly snatches all that are within 
reach. It is a style which is remarkable alike for its 
seeming ease and for its flexibility, rising and falling, as 
it does, with the theme, — now plain and now ornamental, 
— at one moment swelling in climaxes, and at the next 



342 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

sinking to its ordinary level, — terse or flowing, pointed 
or picturesque, — always responding to the dominant mood 
of the speaker, as the instrument responds to the touch 
of the master's fingers. Above all, does it thrill and 
charm by its delicious cadences, some of which linger 
forever in the ear like strains of delicious music. There 
are occasional pages of transcendent beauty that one can- 
not read without a tremor, a shiver in the blood, such as 
perfect verse sometimes produces. It is for this reason 
that so many passages from Everett's speeches are treas- 
ured in school-books, selected for declamation, and quoted 
on festal days. He is the very beau ideal of a Fourth of 
July orator. What can be more felicitous than the choice 
and collocation of the words in the following passages from 
his addresses? — 

" The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The lahoring 
masts seem straining from their base ;— the dismal sound of the pumps is heard ; 
— the ship leaps, as it were, madly, from billow to billow; — the ocean breaks, 
and settles with engulphing floods over the floating deck, and beats with dead- 
ening weight against the staggered vessel." 

" Greece cries to us by the convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthe- 
nes; and Rome pleads with us, in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully." 

" Before the heaving bellows had urged the furnace, before a hammer had 
been struck upon an anvil, before the gleaming waters had flashed from an oar. 
before trade had hung up its scales or gauged its measures, the culture of the 
soil began. ' To dress the garden and to keep it,'— this was the key-note struck 
by the hand of God himself in that long, joyous, wailing, triumphant, troubled, 
pensive strain of life-music which sounds through the generations and ages of 
our race." 

"They come from the embattled cliffs of Abraham; they start from the 
heaving sods of Bunker's hill ; they gather from the blazing lines of Saratoga and 
Yorktown; from the blood-dyed waters of the Brandywine; from the dreary 
snows of Valley Forge, and all the hard -fought fields of the war." 

In glancing over his published volumes, we are struck 
by the vast number of topics which Everett has treated, 
and the affluence of learning with which he has illustrated 
them. Here are elaborate literary addresses before col- 
lege and academic audiences, anniversary discourses cele- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — EVERETT. 343 

brating the great battles of the Revolution, Fourth- of- July 
orations, eulogies on La Fayette and American patriots, 
as Adams and Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams; lyceum 
lectures; festival, agricultural, scientific, educational, tem- 
perance, charitable, legislative addresses, etc., any one of 
which shows a wealth of knowledge and a felicity of 
treatment sufficient to make the reputation of an ordi- 
nary speaker. One knows not which most to admire in 
these discourses, the comprehensive grasp of mind, the 
power of minute observation, and the strong common sense 
which they reveal, or the vivid imagination, the glowing 
fancy, and the exquisite taste, which have caused even 
the most hackneyed topics to receive a new, intenser, and 
brighter illumination from his pen. The thoroughly Amer- 
ican tone of his historical discourses will strike every 
reader, as will also the pictorial power with which he 
depicts past events and scenes. Like certain animals 
whose color is that of the trees or earth on which they 
grow, he is always blended and identified with his natal 
soil. 

One of his noblest efforts is his first Phi-Beta-Kappa 
Oration, delivered at Cambridge in 1824. It was a de- 
fense of republican institutions, as affecting the cultiva- 
tion of letters and science. The orator was then in the 
flush of early manhood, and astonished all who heard him 
by the amplitude of his learning, the richness of his 
fancy, the captivating and luxuriant beauty of his meta- 
phors and tropes, and the witchery of his diction and 
elocution. The style is polished to the last degree of art, 
and the concluding passages, particularly the address to 
Lafayette, stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet. The 
Plymouth and Concord addresses are also masterpieces of 



344 OKATORY AND ORATORS. 

their kind, and we doubt whether Macaulay, among all 
his gorgeous pieces of historical painting, has anything 
more impressive than the celebrated description of the 
landing of the Pilgrims, or the vivid picture of the death- 
bed of Copernicus. The eulogy on La Fayette, with its 
masterly contrast between La Fayette and Napoleon, and 
the concluding apostrophe to Washington's picture and the 
bust of La Fayette, abound also in that vigor of concep- 
tion, that luxuriance of imagery, that felicitj- of allusion, 
that beauty of word-painting, and that exquisite rbythmus, 
which characterize all his productions. He has rifled the 
gardens, both of ancient and modern literature, of their 
amaranthine flowers, and their fragrance breathes from 
every sentence that drops from his pen. All these gifts 
would have been comparatively unavailing, had his phys- 
ical gifts not corresponded to them. Happily, Nature did 
not tantalize him in this way, but gave him a fine, well- 
proportioned figure, a countenance in which gravity and 
thoughtfulness were mingled with gentleness, and an eye 
large and beaming, and dilating, at times, with wonderful 
lustre. She gave him also, a voice clear and sweet, as 
well as full, rich, and varied. It was equally fitted to 
utter the softest tones of pit}^ and the loftiest accents of 
indignation; its lowest whisper was distinctly heard in a 
large hall, and when its full volume rolled over an audi- 
ence, it was like the swell of an organ. His gestures, 
too, if not so impressive as those of more impassioned or- 
ators, were singularly graceful, expressive, and appropri- 
ate. In short, to sum up, Everett's eloquence was marked 
not so much by any one predominating excellence, as by 
the fusion of various excellences into one. It was not due 
to richness of thought, to affluence of fancy, to ripe schol- 



POLITICAL ORATORS — EVERETT. 345 

arship, to an exquisite sense of the proprieties and har- 
monies of speech, to silvery tones, or expressive gestures, 
but to a happy blending of them all, — a union as perfect 
as the blending of the prismatic colors in a ray of light. 
He did not merely convince, or move, or charm his hear- 
ers, but they were subdued and captivated by an appeal 
to their reason, heart, and senses, together. To read his 
addresses, now that his silvery accents are hushed, is a 
rare pleasure; but to hear them, accompanied by the magic 
spell of his delivery, — by the cadences and tones, "the 
swells and sweeps and subsidences of feeling," the poetry 
of gesture, attitude, and eye, with which the enchanter 
sent them home to the mind and heart, — was a felicity 
which one may no more forget than he can give expres- 
sion to it in words. 



CHAPTER XII. 

FORENSIC ORATORS. 

TN the long roll of names which have shed lustre on 
-*- the British bar, there is no one about which clusters 
more of romance and undying interest than about that 
of Thomas Erskine. The remarkable circumstances un- 
der which he was called' to the bar, — the giant strides by 
which he rose to the very heights of the profession, — the 
brilliancy of his eloquence, — his profound knowledge of 
human nature and the workings of human passion, — the 
singular union in his mind of courage with caution, of 
coolness and self-possession with enthusiasm, — his rare 
powers of persuasion, — his elegant physique and personal 
magnetism, — all have invested the name of this great 
Nisi Prius leader with a fascination which attaches to that 
of hardly any other great lawyer, from Sir Thomas More 
to Sir William Follett. "Nostrce eloquentice forensis facile 
princeps" is the inscription placed upon the fine bust of 
Lord Erskine by Nollekens, and by universal admission, 
the defender of Tooke and Stockdale has been awarded 
the palm over all compeers, — while one of his biogra- 
phers, himself an occupant of the woolsack, has pronounced 
him the greatest advocate, as well as the first forensic 
orator, who ever appeared in any age. 

The circumstances of his early life are well known to 
all. The family to which he belonged was one of ancient 

346 



FORENSIC ORATORS — ERSKINE. 347 

pedigree, and had been remarkably prolific in men of tal- 
ents, but was now reduced to the very verge of poverty. 
The means of the Earl of Buchan, his father, had been 
exhausted in educating his two eldest sons, and the young- 
est was therefore obliged to start in life with but little 
training and a scanty stock, if stock it could be called, of 
classical learning. While at school he exhibited a reten- 
tive memory, and when roused by extraordinary stimuli, 
great capacity for labor; but, on the whole, he was lazy, 
and gave little promise of future distinction. His play- 
fulness and love of fun, his lively fancy and. nimble wit, 
made him, nevertheless, the favorite of his schoolmates — 
of all, indeed, who knew him; and when we add to these 
high social qualities the great natural ability, prodigious 
capacity of application, and self-confidence amounting to 
absolute egotism, which he possessed, it is not wonder- 
ful, perhaps, that when called to the bar, he was able to 
place himself in the very front rank of his fellow-gowns- 
men. At the age of fourteen he became a midshipman 
in the navy, where he remained four years, till, upon the 
death of his father, he decided to try his fortune in the 
army. Being ordered with his regiment to Minorca, and 
finding himself, at the age of twenty, shut up in a small 
island, exiled from congenial society, and thrown upon 
his own resources, he applied himself diligently to study, 
and to the cultivation of the naturally powerful genius 
with which he was endowed. Laboriously and systemat- 
ically he tried to master the English literature, and read 
thoughtfully the great classics of our language. Milton 
and Shakspeare were his favorite authors, and he read and 
re-read their pages, with those of Pope and Dryden, un- 
til he had them almost by heart. Eeturning to England, 



848 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

he was promoted to a lieutenancy, but grew weary of 
trudging about from one provincial town to another, es- 
pecially as he was compelled all the while to keep his 
family in a barrack- room or in lodgings. Conscious of 
powers that fitted him to adorn a larger sphere, he chafed 
against the iron circumstances that hemmed him in, like 
an eagle against the bars of his cage. At this juncture 
he chanced to attend a trial before Lord Mansfield, and, 
while listening with the keenest interest to the argu- 
ments of the able counsel, fancied that he could have 
made a better speech than any of them, on whichever 
side retained. The thought then struck him that it might 
not even now be too late to become a lawyer. Acting 
at once upon this thought with a self-confidence which 
was itself almost a sure prophecy of success, he was en- 
tered in April, 1775, as a student of Lincoln's Inn, and 
in July, 1778, was called to the bar. 

The distinguishing traits of his eloquence were shown, 
in a large degree, in his very first jury address, which 
was made in the following November. The circumstances 
of the case were these: A certain Captain Baillie, a vet- 
eran seaman of great worth, who, for his services, held 
an office at the Greenwich Hospital, discovered in the 
establishment the grossest of abuses. Having vainly tried 
to obtain a redress of these evils, he published a state- 
ment of the case, severely censuring Lord Sandwich, First 
Lord of the Admiralty, who, for electioneering purposes, 
had placed in the Hospital many landsmen. Captain B. 
was at once suspended by the Board of Admiralty, and, 
instigated by Lord Sandwich, who himself kept in the 
background, some of the inferior agents filed against Mr. B. 
a criminal information for libel. The case excited great 



FORENSIC ORATORS — ERSKINE. 349 

public interest, and the facts were everywhere canvassed. 
Dining at a friend's house where Captain Baillie was 
present, Erskine, who was a stranger to the Captain, de- 
nounced with great severity the corrupt and scandalous 
practices imputed to Lord Sandwich. Inquiring who the 
young man was, Baillie was told that he had just been 
called to the bar, and had formerly been in the navy, — 
upon which the Captain at once said, " Then I'll have him 
for my counsel." When Michaelmas came round, a brief 
was delivered to Erskine; but to his dismay he found upon 
it the names of four senior counsel, and, despairing of 
being heard after so many predecessors, he gave himself 
no trouble about the matter. Moreover, the other counsel 
had so little hope of success that they advised Captain 
Baillie to pay the costs and escape a trial, as the prosecu- 
tion had proposed. But Erskine strenuously dissented, and 
the defendant agreed .with him. " You are the man for 
me," he said, hugging the young advocate in his arms, 
" I will never give up." Once more his star favored him. 
When the cause came on, the affidavits were so long, and 
some of the counsel so tedious, — a tediousness aggravated 
by the circumstance that one of them was afflicted with 
strangury, and had to retire once or twice in the course 
of his argument, — that Lord Mansfield adjourned the cause 
till the next morning, thus giving the young advocate a 
whole night to arrange his thoughts, and enabling him 
to address the court when its faculties were awake and 
freshened. 

The next day, the judges having taken their seats, and 
the court being crowded with an eager audience, to the 
general surprise " there arose from the back seat a young 
gentleman whose name as well as whose face was unknown 



350 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

to almost all present, and who, in a collected, firm, but 
sweet, modest, and conciliating tone," began his address. 
After a short exordium, he proceeded to show that his 
client had written nothing but the truth, and had acted 
strictly within the line of his duty. He then denounced 
in that vehement and indignant language of which he 
afterward proved himself so consummate a master, the 
injustice which had suspended such a man from office 
without proof of his guilt, and mentioned Lord Sandwich 
by name, — when Lord Mansfield interposed, and reminded 
the counsel that the First Lord of the Admiralty was not 
before the Court. It was at this critical moment that was 
manifested for the first time by Erskine that heroic courage 
which shone forth so conspicuously in all his subsequent 
career. Unawed by the words or venerable presence of 
Mansfield, whose word had been law in Westminster Hall 
for a quarter of a century, the intrepid young advocate 
burst forth impetuously: 

" 1 know that he is not formally before the court, but, for that very reason, 
/ will bring him before the court. He has placed these men in the front of the 
battle, in order to escape under their shelter, but I will not join in battle with 
them ; their vices, though screwed up to the highest pitch of depravity, are not 
of dignity enough to vindicate the combat with me. I will drag him to light who 
is the dark mover behind this scene of iniquity. I assert that the Earl of Sand- 
wich has but one road to escape out of this business without pollution and dis- 
grace,— and that is, by publicly disavowing the acts of the prosecutors, and 
restoring Captain Baillie to his command ... If, on the contrary, he continues 
to protect the prosecutors in spite of the evidence of their guilt, which has ex- 
cited the abhorrence of the numerous audience who crowd this court, if he keeps 
this injured man suspended, or dares to turn that suspension into a removal, I 
shall then not scruple to declare him an accomplice in their guilt, a shameless op- 
pressor, a disgrace to his rank, and a traitor to his trust. 

"• My lords, this matter is of the last importance. I speak not as an advocate 
alone,— I speak to you as a man, — as a member of the state whose very exist- 
ence depends upon her naval strength. If our fleets are to be crippled by the 
baneful influence of elections, we are lost indeed. If the seaman, while he 
exposes his body to fatigues and dangers, looking forward to Greenwich as an 
asylum for infirmity and old age, sees the gates of it blocked up by corruption, 
and hears the mirth and riot of luxurious landsmen drowning the groans and 
complaints of the wounded, helpless companions of his glory,— he will tempt the 



FORENSIC ORATORS — ERSKINE. 351 

seas no more. The Admiralty may press his body indeed, at the expense of hu- 
manity and the constitution, but they cannot press his mind; they cannot press 
the heroic ardor of a British sailor; and, instead of a fleet to carry terror all 
around the globe, the Admiralty may not be able much longer to amuse us with 
even the peaceable, unsubstantial pageant of a review. (There had just been a 
naval review at Portsmouth.) Fine and imprisonment! The man deserves a 
palace, instead of a prison, who prevents the palace built by the public bounty of 
his country from being converted into a dungeon, and who sacrifices his own 
security to the interests of humanity and virtue! " 

It is scarcely necessary to say that the decision was 
for the defendant. The effect produced by this bold and 
impassioned burst of eloquence was prodigious. Erskine 
had entered Westminster Hall that morning a pauper; 
he left it a rich man. As he marched along the hall, 
after the judges had risen, the attorneys nocked around 
him with their briefs, and retainer fees rained upon him. 
From this time his business rapidly increased until his 
annual income amounted to £12,000. A rise so rapid is 
hardly paralleled out of the fairy tales of the Arabian 
Nights. Considering all the circumstances under which 
the speech was delivered, — that it was the maiden effort 
of a barrister only just called, and wholly unpracticed in 
public speaking, before a court crowded with men of the 
greatest distinction, and of all parties in the state, — that 
the debutant came after four eminent counsel, who might 
have been supposed to have exhausted the subject, — that 
he was checked "in mid- volley" by no less a judge than 
Mansfield,— we do not wonder that Lord Campbell pro- 
nounces it "the most wonderful forensic effort of which 
we have any account in British annals. The exclamation, 
'I will bring him before the court!' and the crushing 
denunciation of Lord Sandwich,— in which he was enabled 
to persevere from the sympathy of the bystanders, and 
even of the judges, who, in strictness, ought to have checked 
his irregularity,— are as soul-stirring as anything in this 



352 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

species of eloquence presented to us by ancient or modern 
times." 

Mr. Erskine's first important argument before a jury 
was made in defense of Lord George Gordon, in 1781. 
His speech in that case sounded the death-knell of con- 
structive treason. Lord Campbell, in speaking of it, says: 
" Regularly trained to the law, having practiced thirty 
years at the bar, having been Attorney-General above 
seven years, having been present at many trials of high 
treason, and having conducted several myself, I again 
peruse with increased astonishment and delight, the speech 
delivered on this occasion. . . . Here I find not only won- 
derful acuteness, powerful reasoning, enthusiastic zeal, and 
burning eloquence, but the most masterly view ever given 
of the English law of high treason, the foundation of all 
our liberty." It was, however, in the celebrated state trials 
during the "Reign of Terror," from 1792 to 1806, that 
Erskine won his highest fame as an advocate, — when by 
his genius and exertions he obtained verdicts of acquittal 
in the teeth of a strong government, and rescued, as his 
friends believed, the public liberties from danger. His 
speeches for and against Thomas Paine, in defense of 
Hardy, Home Tooke, Thelwall, and, above all, the one in 
defense of Stockdale, are masterpieces of argument and 
eloquence which have never been surpassed in Europe or 
America. The latter is admitted by common consent to 
be the chef-d'oeuvre of Lord Erskine's orations, and, take 
it all in all, the most consummate specimen of forensic 
oratory in our language. What can be finer than the 
following apology for excess, which is one only of many 
gems in this oration? 



FORENSIC ORATORS — ERSKINE, 353 

" From minds thus subdued by the terrors of punishment there could issue 
no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason, nor any masterly 
compositions on the general nature of government, by the help of which the 
great commonwealths of mankind have founded their establishments; much 
less any of those useful applications of them to critical conjunctures, by which, 
from time to time, our own constitution, by the exertions of patriot citizens, has 
been brought back to its standard. Under such terrors all the great lights of sci- 
ence and civilization must be extinguished,— for men cannot communicate their 
free thoughts to one another with a lash held over their heads. It is the nature 
of everything that is great and useful, both in the animate and inanimate world, 
to be wild and irregular; and we must be contented to take them with the alloys 
which belong to them, or live without them. Genius breaks from the fetters 
of criticism; but its wanderings are sanctioned by its majesty and wisdom when 
it advances in its path: subject it to the critic, and you tame it into dullness. 
Mighty rivers break down their banks in the winter, sweeping to death the flocks 
which are fattened on the soil that they fertilize in the summer,— the few may 
be saved by embankments from drowning, but the flock must perish for hunger. 
Tempests occasionally shake our dwellings and dissipate our commerce; but 
they scourge before them the lazy elements which without them would stagnate 
into pestilence. In like manner, Liberty herself, the last and best gift of God to 
his creatures, must be taken just as she is. You might pare her down into bash- 
ful regularity, and shape her into a perfect model of severe scrupulous law; but 
she would then be Liberty no longer,— and you must be content to die under 
the lash of this inexorable justice, which you had exchanged for the banners of 
freedom. 11 

It was in the same speech that he delivered " that vic- 
torious and triumphant passage," as Lord Brougham terms 
it, " which contributed, doubtless, largely to the deliver- 
ance of his client, and will remain an everlasting monu- 
ment of his own glory, whilst the name of England and 
its language shall endure": 

kk I have been speaking of man and his nature, and of human dominion, 
from what I have seen of them myself among nations reluctant of our au- 
thority. I know what they feel, and how such feelings can alone be re- 
pressed. I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indig- 
nant character of a prince, surrounded by his subjects, addressing the governor 
of a British colony, holding a bundle of sticks in his hands, as the notes of 
his unlettered eloquence. k Who is it, 1 said the jealous ruler of the desert, 
encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventure,— ' who is it that 
causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in sum- 
mer? Who is it that causes this river to rise in the mountains, and to empty 
itself in the ocean? Who is it that rears up the shade of these lofty oaks, 
and blasts them with the quick lightnings at his pleasure? The same Being 
who gave you a country on the other side of the waters, and gave ours to us ; 
and by this title we will defend it, 1 said the warrior, throwing his tomahawk 
upon the ground, and raising the war-sound of his nation. These are the 
15* 



354 ORATORY A^D ORATORS. 

feelings of subjugated man all round the globe; and depend upon it. nothing 
but fear will control where it is vain to look for affection. " 

It is interesting to know that the speech upon which 
Lord Erskine most prided himself, and the recollection of 
which afforded him during all his life the profoundest 
satisfaction, was that delivered on the trial of Thomas 
Paine for his blasphemous work, " The Age of Reason." 
The speech abounds in gorgeous passages, of which the 
finest is that in which he bursts into a glowing apostrophe 
of the devout, holy and sublime spirits who have in all 
ages held to the faith of God's word, and appeals to the 
testimony of Hale, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and especially 
Milton, who, having been deprived of the natural light of 
the body, enjoyed the clear shining of the celestial day, 
which enabled him "to justify the ways of God to man." 
The speech was printed by the Society for the Suppres- 
sion of Vice, and had an immense circulation, " which 
gave me," he says, " the greatest satisfaction, as I would 
rather that all of my other speeches were committed to 
the flames, or in any manner buried in oblivion, than that 
a single page of it should be lost." 

The question naturally suggests itself, What were the 
qualities of Erskine's eloquence which made it so pro- 
foundly impressive, and enabled him in the outset of his 
career to place himself by a single bound in advance of 
all his rivals? A profound lawyer he was not, nor was 
he well equipped with the learning of the schools. It 
was not to its rhetorical qualities, to its beauty of diction. 
its richness of ornament or illustration, its wit, humor, 
or sarcasm, that his oratory owed its power and charm, 
but to its matchless strength and vigor. His first great 
excellence was his devotion to his client, to which all other 



FORENSIC ORATORS — ERSKINE. 355 

considerations were made secondary. Self was forgotten 
in the character he personated. From the moment the 
jury were sworn he thought of nothing but the verdict 
till it was recorded in his favor. The earnestness, the 
vehemence, the energy of the advocate were ever present 
throughout his speeches, impressing the arguments upon 
the mind of the hearer with a force which seemed to 
compel conviction. He resisted every temptation to mere 
declamation which his luxuriant fancy cast in his path, 
and won his verdicts not more by what he said than by 
what he refrained from saying. Even in the longest of 
his speeches there is no weakness, no nagging; but the 
same earnestness of manner, the same lively statement of 
facts, the same luminous exposition of argument, from be- 
ginning to close. Hence it was that his hearers never 
yawned or went to sleep under his oratory; that after 
the court and jury had listened for days to witnesses and 
other barristers, till their endurance was nearly exhausted, 
he had but to address them for five minutes when every 
feeling of weariness would vanish, and they would hang 
spell-bound upon his words. Less deeply versed in the 
law than many of his rivals, he had a marvellous power 
of availing himself of the knowledge collected for his use 
by others. In his speech in defense of the Rights of 
Juries, he is admitted to have exhibited a depth of learn- 
ing that would have done honor to Selden or Hale; and 
so thoroughly had he mastered the materials of his brief 
which black-letter lawyers had spent months in search- 
ing out, that he poured forth all this learning in his ar- 
gument before the court with the freshness and precision 
of one who had spent his life in such researches. Grasp- 
ing all the facts and principles of a case, he never forgot 



356 ORATORY a:n"d orators. 

a decision, an analogy, or the pettiest circumstance which 
made for his client; while his dexterity in avoiding the 
difficulties of his case, and in turning to his own advan- 
tage the unexpected disclosures which were sometimes 
made in the course of a trial, was positively wonderful. 
Another marked peculiarity of Erskine's oratory was 
the keen insight which it displayed of the workings of 
the human mind. He spoke, it has been well said, as his 
clients would respectively have spoken, if endowed with 
his genius. Mr. Roscoe, in his "Lives of Eminent British 
Lawyers," remarks that there never was an advocate who 
studied with nicer discrimination and more deliberate tact 
the feelings of a jury than did Erskine. Like every great 
orator, he was largely dependent upon, and aided by, that 
sympathy of his hearers which Cicero says is the support 
and food of a public speaker. " He felt his ground inch 
by inch." Even in his loftiest and most thrilling bursts 
of orator} r , when he was apparently wholly absorbed in 
his subject, forgetful of all things else, he was intently 
scanning the faces of the jury, and watching the impres- 
sion of his speech, as revealed in their changing looks. 
Guided by this index, he varied the tone of his address; 
now rising, as he saw the feelings of the jury rise, into 
impassioned displays of oratory, — now subsiding, as he 
saw the passions of the jury subside, into cool and tem- 
perate argument. His speeches abound in observations 
which exhibit this remarkable faculty. In his speech on 
the trial of Lord George Gordon, he exclaimed, "Gentle- 
men, I see your minds revolt at such shocking proposi- 
tions!" On the trial of Stockdale he said, "Gentlemen, I 
observe plainly, and with infinite satisfaction, that you are 
shocked and offended at my even supposing it possible 



FORENSIC ORATORS — ERSKINE. 857 

that you should pronounce such a detestable judgment." 
Even after he' had sat down, his eye was still on the jury. 
The order in which Erskine marshalled his arguments 
showed a profound knowledge of the human mind, and 
contributed greatly to their effect. Like a skillful gen- 
eral, he massed his forces on one point of assault. In- 
stead of frittering away the strength of his reasonings, 
as do so many even able advocates, by arranging them 
under so many distinct heads, he proposed a great lead- 
ing principle, to which all his efforts were referable and 
subsidiary, — which ran through the whole of his address, 
governing and elucidating every part. As the rills and 
streams of a valley, whether they run hither or thither, 
northward or southward, yet meet and mingle at last into 
one, till the thousand brooks become a torrent, so the ar- 
guments, facts, and illustrations in one of these speeches 
were made to rush together into a common channel, and 
strike with tremendous impact on the mind. As in at- 
tack so in defense; choosing some one strong position, he 
concentrated upon it all his powers of logic and argu- 
ment, knowing that if it only could be made impregna- 
ble, it mattered little what became of minor points, — the 
defense would infallibly prove fatal to his adversary's 
case. The effect of this method was not only to strength- 
en his arguments, but greatly to facilitate their remem- 
brance by his hearers. If he sometimes diverged from the 
" grand trunk line " of his reasoning, as he occasionally 
did to relieve the overburdened minds of his hearers, he 
made even the digression enforce his argument; for from 
every excursion he brought back some weighty argument 
or apt illustration which gave to his earnest appeals a 
new and startling force. While the matter of his speeches 



358 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

was thus admirably adapted to their object, the manner 
was equally excellent, the style being the obedient and 
flexible instrument of the thought. Chaste, polished, and 
harmonious, it was at the same time full of energy and 
force, and was equally free from mannerism and from all 
straining after effect. In simile and metaphor he rarely 
indulged, still more rarely in wit, but sent his appeals 
straight home to the reason rather than to the taste and 
imagination of his auditors. The rhythmus of his sentences, 
as in those of Grattan, was wondrously beautiful; Lord 
Campbell attributes much of the charm of his eloquence to 
" the exquisite sweetness of his diction, pure, simple, and 
mellifluous, — the cadences not being borrowed from any 
model, nor following any rule, but marked by constant 
harmony and variety."' 

To all these attractions must be added the charms of 
an elegant person, and a magnetism in the eye which was 
almost irresistible. t; His form was peculiarly graceful, 
slender, and supple, yet, when warmed by an address, quiv- 
ering with the pent-up excitement of the occasion. His 
features were regularly beautiful, and susceptible of infi- 
nite variety of expression, and at times lighted up with 
a smile of surpassing sweetness." Juries, according to 
Lord Brougham, have declared that they felt it impossi- 
ble to remove their looks from him, when he had riveted, 
and, as it were, fascinated them by his first glance; and 
it used to be a common remark of men who observed 
his motions, that they resembled those of a blood-horse; as 
light, as limber, as much betokening strength and speed, 
as free from all gross superfluity or encumbrance. 

Of all the lawyers that ever lived, Erskine seems to 
have made the closest approach to the ideal of a forensic 



FORENSIC ORATORS — PINKNEY. 359 

advocate. In reading his speeches, and thinking of the 
looks, tones, and action that accompanied their delivery, we 
are tempted to ask, in the language of Choate concerning 
Kossuth: "When shall we be quite certain again that the 
lyre of Orpheus did not kindle the savage native to a tran- 
sient discourse of rea.son, — did not suspend the labors and 
charm the pains of the damned, — did not lay the keeper 
of the grave asleep, and win back Eurydice from the world 
beyond the river, to the warm, upper air! " As examples 
of acute and powerful reasoning, enlivened by glowing 
eloquence, these speeches are among the grandest of their 
class in our language; and a profound study of them 
would do much to correct the leading vices of American 
oratory. Let the young attorney, in particular, devote his 
days and nights to analyzing their excellences, till he has 
mastered the secret of their power; and if, after a micro- 
scopic survey of their qualities, he fails to " form to theirs 
the relish of his soul," and can still delight in " spread- 
eagleism," we will agree that his faults are incorrigible, 
and bid him, in the words of Horace, " stultum esse 
Mbenter." 

America has produced a great number of forensic ora- 
tors, and among them few have left so great a name as 
William Pinkney, of Maryland. Unfortunately the fame 
of his eloquence rests chiefly on tradition, none of his prin- 
cipal speeches having been preserved. He was enthusi- 
astically fond of his profession, and, beyond almost all of 
his contemporaries, ambitious of its triumphs. Emulation 
and the love of distinction, even more than his keen appe- 
tite for knowledge, were the motives that urged him on 
in his indefatigable efforts at self-improvement, and they 



360 ORATORY AXD ORATORS. 

allowed him no rest while it was possible to increase his 
intellectual stores. " I never heard him allow/' said a 
friend of his, " that any man was his superior in any- 
thing, . . . especially in oratory, on which his great am- 
bition rested." Even when serving his country as a dip- 
lomatist in Europe, he applied himself indefatigably to 
his law studies. All other pursuits, the pleasures of soci- 
ety, and even the repose which nature demands, were 
sacrificed to this engrossing object. Even after he had 
accumulated a vast stock of legal knowledge, he ap- 
proached every new cause with the ardor and zeal of 
one who had still his reputation to earn. " He was never 
satisfied, 11 says his biographer, " with exploring its facts. 
and all the technical learning which it involved.' 1 In 
preparing his speeches, whether for the forum or the 
Senate, he was equally unsparing of toil. All his life 
he declaimed much in private, and he carefully premedi- 
tated, not only the general order of his speeches, and the 
topics of illustration, but also the rhetorical embellish- 
ments, which last he sometimes wrote out beforehand. 
To supply himself with these, he noted in his reading 
every allusion or image that could be turned to use. He 
piqued himself on his critical knowledge of the English 
language, of whose structure and vocabulary he had a 
minute knowledge, if not a thorough mastery. Being- 
mortified, when in England, by his inability to answer 
some question in classical literature, he resumed his clas- 
sical studies, and put himself under an instructor to 
acquire a better knowledge of ancient literature. 

In what lay the charm of his oratory, it is not easy to 
say. The Supreme Court room at Washington was always 
crowded when he was about to speak, and however dry 



FORENSIC ORATORS — PINKNEY. 361 

the theme, or abstruse his arguments, he held the un- 
flagging attention of his hearers till he sat down. Much 
of the popular interest in his speaking must have been 
due to the energy and earnestness of his manner, to his 
rare command of beautiful and expressive diction, and to 
the flowers of fancy with which he embellished the most 
arid and unpromising themes. Rufus Choate regarded 
him as the most consummate master of a manly and 
exuberant spoken English that he ever heard, and he had 
him always in view as a model for imitation. No Ameri- 
can advocate ever bestowed more pains upon his manner. 
He practiced speaking before a mirror, and all his atti- 
tudes, gestures, facial expressions, etc., were apparently 
studied beforehand, to the minutest action. When about 
to argue a case, he was nervous and restless, burning 
with a kind of impatient rage for the fray. Professor 
Ticknor, who saw him once in the Supreme Court, as he 
was waiting to begin an argument, says that he showed 
by frequently moving his seat, and by the convulsive 
twitches of his face, how anxious he was to come to the 
conflict. "At last the judges ceased to read, and he 
sprang into the arena like a lion who had been loosed 
by his keepers on the gladiator who awaited him." His 
style of elocution was evidently borrowed from no one. 
Beginning with some timidity, and speaking in low and 
indistinct murmurs, as if he were conjuring up the spirit 
of his elocution by muttered incantations, he shook off 
his embarrassment as he advanced, and, raising his voice 
to a higher and higher key, was soon borne along on the 
tide of an impetuous and overwhelming oratory. Both in 
his senatorial and his forensic speeches, he " spoke with 
great vehemence, rushing from thought to thought with 
16 



362 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

a sort of ferocity; his eye fiery, his nostrils distended, and 
his lips covered with froth, which he would wipe away." 
His gesture was also peculiar. His right arm was not 
brandished in the usual manner, but " brought in frequent 
sweeps along his side; his right foot advanced, and his 
body alternately thrown back as if about to spring, and 
heaved forward again, as if in act to strike down his 
adversary; big drops of sweat all the while coursing along 
their channels from his forehead." 

It is evident, from the accounts even of his admirers, 
that his elocution was too vehement and declamatory for 
legal discussions, if not for jury addresses, as it is evident, 
also, that his rhetoric was too stilted and overwrought to 
merit the highest praise. We are told by his biographer, 
that Johnson and Gibbon were his favorite English prose- 
writers; and to his admiration for their elaborate, pompous, 
and somewhat frigid style, which he thought the proper 
models for an orator, we may attribute in part the vices 
of his diction. By a strange paradox, with all his vehe- 
mence there was a lack of real fire and fervor; and while 
his warmth, if it could be called such, was that of the 
rhetorician, his figures, which were sometimes far-fetched 
and over-fanciful, '* seemed cold, and rather embroidered 
on the web of his discourse than woven into it." Even in 
the loftiest and most impassioned climax of his impetuous 
speech, he seemed never so absorbed in his theme as to 
be wholly self-forgetful. As with the orator mentioned 
by Cicero, who, metuens ne vitiosum, etiam verum sanguinem 
deperdebat, his anxiety to appear well was self-defeating; 
and it was not till at a late period in his life, that he 
learned to press on with all his energies to the goal, with- 
out stopping to pick up the flowers that tempted him on 



FORENSIC ORATORS — PINKNEY. 363 

the way. It was in the discussion, before the Supreme 
Court, of questions relating to the interpretation of the 
federal constitution and to international law, that his 
great abilities appeared to the most signal advantage. His 
arguments before that "more than Amphictyonic Council 1 ' 
were generally characterized by an earnestness, gravity, 
eloquence, and force of reasoning, as well as a depth of 
learning, which were fully proportioned to the magnitude 
of the occasion, and which convinced all who heard him 
that he gave expression not merely to the sentiments of 
the hired advocate, but also to those of the patriot. He 
was preeminently a legal logician, having, as Rufus Choate 
truly said, " as fine a legal head as ever was grown in 
America." 

In appearance Pinkney was robust, square-shouldered, 
and firm-set. He had a somewhat low forehead, and an 
oval head; with eyes that were changeful in expression, 
but quickly lighted up by excitement. The habitual ex- 
pression of his face was mirthful, yet it was deeply fur- 
rowed with the lines of thought. The haughtiness of his 
disposition, which, however, was shown to his peers, 
never to his inferiors, was manifested in his carriage, of 
which it has been said that it was more than erect, — it 
might be called perpendicular. His port at the bar to- 
ward his equals was antagonistic and defiant. Always 
alert and guarded, he granted no favors, and he asked 
none. "His courtesy in this arena was a mere formula, 
and rather suggested conflict than avoided it." Few per- 
sons of equal ability have been so attentive to the min- 
utest details of their personal appearance. He changed 
his toilet twice a day, and was always elaborately dressed, 
without regard to fashion, in the style which he deemed 



364 ORATOKY AND ORATORS. 

best fitted to show off his fine person. His nicely brushed 
blue coat, white waistcoat with gold buttons, snowy-white 
linen, gold studs, boots shining with the highest polish, lit- 
tle cane twirling in his saffron- gloved fingers, with his air 
of ease, abandon, and "devil-may-care jauntiness," suggest- 
ed a Brummel or a Beau Nash rather than the giant of 
the American bar. Not unfrequently, we are told, " he 
carried his whole array of dandyism into court, and opened 
his harangue with all his butterfly costume intact, . . . 
fastidiously dressed at every point." It is even said that 
he wore corsets to check his growing corpulence, used 
cosmetics to smooth the roughnesses of his face, and rub- 
bed his body with ointment to stimulate his mental facul- 
ties. Probably no advocate that ever lived, — certainly no 
great advocate, — ever betrayed more fondness for theat- 
rical effects. It was a common trick of his, when called 
upon to argue a great cause, to plead a want of prepara- 
tion, though he had been toiling night and day for weeks 
upon his argument. Sometimes he would show himself 
at a fashionable party or at a public meeting, the night 
before he was to speak in court, so as to give the im- 
pression that his logic and eloquence were off-hand, and 
would then go home and spend the whole night in elab- 
orating " impromptu " bursts for the morrow. In spite of 
all this foppishness and affectation, which were the more 
unworthy of him as he did not need any such deceptive 
recommendations, he was one of the giants of the bar and 
the senate; and " no man," says Wirt, "dared to grapple 
with him without the most perfect preparation, and the 
full possession of all his strength." 

We have a good specimen of Pinkney's peculiar elo- 
quence in his argument on the famous case of the Ne- 



FORENSIC ORATORS — CHOATE. 365 

reide, in which arose the novel question of international 
law, whether a neutral could lawfully lade his goods on 
an armed enemy's vessel. 

"The idea is formed by a union of the most repulsive ingredients. It 
exists by an unexampled reconciliation of mortal antipathies. It exhibits such 
a rare discordia rerum, such a stupendous society of jarring elements, or (to 
use an expression of Tacitus) of res insociabiles, that it throws into the shade 
the wildest fictions of poetry. I entreat your Honors to endeavor a personifi- 
cation of this motley notion; and to forgive me for presuming to intimate 
that, if after you have achieved it, you pronounce the notion to be correct, 
you will have gone a great way to prepare us, by the authority of your opin- 
ion, to receive, as credible history, the worst parts of the mythology of the 
Pagan world. The Centaur and the Proteus of antiquity will be fabulous no 
longer. The prosopopoeia, to which I invite you, is scarcely, indeed, within 
the power of fancy, even in her most riotous and capricious mood, when she 
is best able and most disposed to force incompatibilities into fleeting and 
shadowy combination ; but, if you can accomplish it, will give you something 
like the kid and the lion, the lamb and the tiger portentously incorporated, 
with ferocity and meekness coexistent in the result, and equal as motives of 
action. It will give you a' modern Amazon, more strangely constituted than 
those with whom ancient fable peopled the borders of the Thermidon,— her 
voice compounded of the tremendous shout of the Minerva of Homer and the 
gentle accents of an Arcadian shepherdess, with all the faculties and inclina- 
tions of turbulent and masculine War, and all the retiring modesty of virgin 
Peace. We shall have, in one personage, the pharetrata Camilla of the ^Eneid, 
and the Peneian maid of the Metamorphosis. We shall have Neutrality, soft 
and gentle, and defenseless in herself, yet clad in the panoply of her warlike 
neighbors, with the frown of defiance upon her brow, and the smile of con- 
ciliation upon her lip,— with the spear of Achilles in one hand, and a lying 
protestation of innocence and helplessness unfolded in the other. Nay, if I 
may be allowed so bold a figure in a mere legal discussion, we shall have the 
branch of olive entwined around the bolt of Jove, and Neutrality in the act 
of hurling the latter under the deceitful cover of the former.' 1 



Of the eloquence of Rufus Choate, — America's great- 
est forensic advocate, William Pinkney not excepted, — one 
should have a genius as rare and peculiar as that of 
Choate himself, to give an adequate description. A more 
unique and original, not to say odd and eccentric, yet at the 
same time powerful and effective speaker, never moulded 
a jury at his will. Neither in his looks, action, language, 
or style of argumentation, did he copy from or resemble 



366 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

any other advocate, dead or living. It was our good for- 
tune in 1838, and again in 1847-1856, to hear him both 
in the courts and the lecture-room; yet never have we 
been more impressed with the impotence of language 
than when trying " to wreak upon expression " the im- 
pressions made upon us by his extraordinary looks and 
speech. His tall, robust, erect frame; his rolling, swaying 
gait, and bilious, coffee-colored, oriental complexion; his 
haggard, deeply furrowed face; his large, dark, lustrous 
eyes, lit at times with an unearthly glare, and almost 
startling one with their burning intensity of expression; 
his hair, luxuriant, curling, and black as the raven's; his 
musical voice, now gentle and persuasive, now vehement 
and ringing; his slouching garments which seemed as if 
flung upon him, including a cravat which was said " to 
meet in an indescribable knot that looked like the fortu- 
itous concurrence of original atoms " ; all these it is easy 
to portray singly, but of the " full force and joint result 
of all" they give no more idea than an alphabet gives 
of a poem. But when we add to these details, his appear- 
ance in the grand climacteric moments, when he was in the 
full swing of his impetuous oratory, and so absorbed in 
his theme and isolated from his surroundings as to be in 
" a sort of trance state," the difficulty of photographing 
his looks and manner amounts to an impossibility. The 
vehemence with which he swept on in his argument, like 
a lightning-express train, pouring out his words so fast 
that it was said that, if the magnetic telegraph were af- 
fixed to his mouth, they would heap upon the wires, yet, 
all the while, with the coolest method in his fury, scan- 
ning every look and motion of the judge and jury; the 
ever-changing tones of his voice, ranging through all the 



FORENSIC ORATORS — CHOATE. 367 

notes in the scale, from the lowest audible whisper to a 
positive scream; the tremulous fingers, long and bony, 
which he would run through his curling locks, that dripped 
with perspiration; the clinched fists, which he would now 
swing in the air, and now shake at his opponent's face; 
the convulsive jerks of the body with which he would 
seem to shake every bone in its socket; the triumphant 
manner in which, after a series of burning sentences, he 
would straighten up his quivering body, throw his head 
back, and draw in a full volume of breath through his 
nostrils with a snuffling that was heard over the whole 
court-room; his strange habit of doffing and donning three 
or four diiferent-colored overcoats, in the progress of his 
speech, according to the degree in which he perspired; 
his weird wit and arch pleasantry; his grotesque exag- 
geration; his multiplication of adjectives, as when he 
spoke of a harness as " a safe, sound, substantial, suitable, 
second-rate, second-hand harness," or spoke of the Greek 
mind as " subtle, mysterious, plastic, apprehensive, compre- 
hensive, available," (a dissertation in six words); his laby- 
rinthine sentences, his cumulative logic by which one idea, 
image, or argument, was piled upon another, so as to make 
up an overwhelming mass; his gorgeous, many-colored 
rhetoric, — all together simply beggar description. 

Probably no orator ever lived who threw himself with 
more energy and utter abandonment into the advocacy 
of a cause. When addressing a jury, his whole frame 
was charged with electricity, and literally quivered with 
emotion. The perspiration stood in drops even upon the 
hairs of his head; and he reminded one of the pythoness 
upon her tripod. Sometimes he was so racked and ex- 
hausted by a forensic speech that he could hardly stagger, 



368 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

without aid, to his carriage; and often, though he had an 
iron frame, he would be tormented with sick headache, 
to which he was all his life a martyr, for several days 
afterward. In addressing the bench, on the other hand, 
he was so quiet and subdued in manner as to appear 
like another being. Probably there never was an advo- 
cate in whose brain more opposite elements were united. 
At one moment he burns with a tropical heat, the next 
he is as cool as an iceberg. Keenly sensitive to the slight- 
est impressions, he has as perfect a self-control as a vet- 
eran swordsman. Hurrying other men along in a whirl- 
wind of passionate declamation, he holds his own feelings 
all the while in check with as complete a mastery as if, 
like drilled and veteran troops, they had been taught to 
be " impetuous by rule.'* Mr. E. P. Whipple acutely ob- 
serves that it is one of Choate's peculiarities that he com- 
bines a conservative intellect with a radical sensibility, 
— that he is a kind of Mirabeau-Peel; and this is doubt- 
less the happiest solution of the strange anomalies and 
puzzling contradictions in his character. He is one of 
the few men who have triumphantly achieved that feat 
which, Emerson once said in the " Dial," is the tragedy 
of genius, — attempting to drive along the ecliptic with 
one horse of the heavens and one horse of the earth, — 
the result of which is almost always discord and ruin 
and downfall to chariot and charioteer. With an imag- 
ination of intense vividness and preternatural activity, 
Choate was as practical as the most sordid capitalist that 
ever became an "incarnation of fat dividends." 

Beginning his legal career at Danvers and Salem, Mass., 
chiefly with the practice of criminal law, he rose rapidly 
in his profession, till he had no superior in the state or 



FORENSIC ORATORS — CHOATE. 369 

nation. It is said that the Irish advocate, Plunket, once 
defended a horse-stealer in a country town of his circuit 
with such consummate tact that all the thieves in the 
court-room were in an ecstasy of delight, and one of them, 
unable to control his admiration, burst out into an excla- 
mation, "Long life to you, Plunket! The first horse I 
steal, boys, by Jekers, I'll have Plunket! 1 ' The criminals 
of Essex county must have cherished a similar enthusiastic 
admiration for Choate, for his success in clearing them 
was such that the attorney-general declared that the days 
of the Salem witchcraft had returned again. When Choate 
moved to Boston, all the veteran practitioners of the bar 
looked askance and shook their double chins at him, say- 
ing of his unique style of speaking, as did Jeffrey of 
Wordsworth's poetry, "This will never do"; the public, 
too, laughed at his vehemence of gesture and droll exag- 
geration; but when it was found that there was "a meth- 
od in his madness," — that all these seeming oddities were 
simply means to an end,— that he was aiming to keep 
the jurors' attention alive, and that beneath the roses 
.and flowers there was hidden a blade of Damascus steel, 
— above all, when they found that by some inexplicable 
witchcraft of manner or sorcery of speech he won ver- 
dict after verdict which their " coldly correct and critically 
dull" addresses failed to extort, — they changed their tone. 
" If I live," he wrote one day in his diary, " all the block- 
heads which are shaken at certain mental peculiarities 
shall know and feel a lawyer, a reasoner, and a man of 
business " ; and live he did to confound all gainsayers, and 
make " those who came to scoff remain " to praise. 

In his happiest days, to hear him argue a cause to a 
jury was regarded even by the most cultivated critics of 



370 ORATORY AtfD ORATORS. 

the American Athens as an intellectual feast. The flowers 
of fancy which he scattered along the pathway of his rapid 
and vivid speech ; the profusion of analogies, real and fan- 
ciful, with which his teeming fancy fortified every propo- 
sition, and illustrated every theme; the choice, felicitous, 
and often recondite language gathered from books and the 
market-place; the charming literary, biographic, and his- 
toric allusions; the ingenious and apt illustrations; the 
sudden flashes of wit; the electric bursts of humor; the 
" quick, trampling interrogations with which he assailed an 
antagonist proposition, and gave to his argument an almost 
muscular power " ; the rapid transition from pleasantry to 
pathos, from subtle analysis and searching logic to grand 
outbursts of sentiment, which uplifted the souls of his 
hearers, and invested them for the moment with a portion 
of the orator's own greatness, — all these were elements 
in the composition of that complex and indescribable elo- 
quence whose spell was felt equally by judge and juror, 
by scholar and clown, and to which no one could listen 
unmoved unless he was either " a yahoo or a beatified in- 
telligence." It mattered little how obscure the arena or 
how small the circle of hearers, in which and to whom he 
spoke. In the office of a justice of the peace, or before 
two or three referees in the hall of a country tavern, he 
would squander the same treasures of learning, the same 
affluence of diction, the same felicity of allusion, the same 
frenzy of feeling, as when he spoke before the most learned 
and august tribunal or the most lettered audience. 

It has been justly said that though his style lacked 
simplicity, and suggested by its richness and luxuriance 
an oriental origin, yet it was wonderfully well adapted to 
its purpose, and never failed to be poetic and suggestive. 



FORENSIC ORATORS — CHOATE. 371 

One who was apparently a frequent listener to his en- 
chanting rhetoric, speaks of his discoursing to a jury some- 
times " in tones that linger on the memory like the part- 
ing sound of a cathedral bell, or the dying note of an 
organ. Thrilling it can be as a fife, but it has often a 
plaintive cadence, as though his soul mourned, amid the 
loud and angry tumults of the forum, for the quiet grove 
of the academy, or in these times sighed at the thought 
of those charms and virtues which we dare conceive in 
boyhood, and pursue as men, — the unreached paradise of 
our despair." And yet, strange to say, with all his poetry 
and pathos, his soarings of fancy and his flights of rhet- 
oric, it was not in these that lay his principal power. 
Though he had, as Edward Everett said, " an imagination 
that rose with easy wing to the highest invention of in- 
vention," yet it was mainly his dialectic skill that won 
his victories. In a dry law-argument, hinging on purely 
technical points, he could be, Judge Sprague declared, 
" learned, logical, and profound, or exquisitely refined and 
subtle," as the occasion required. In his arguments, not 
only was each topic presented in all its force, but they 
were all arranged and dovetailed with the most consum- 
mate skill so as to furnish a mutual support. 

During a trial, nothing, in his most passionate moments, 
escaped his eagle-eyed vigilance. One day a lady, in go- 
ing out, made some noise by the rustling of her silk dress. 
Being asked if he noticed it, Mr. Choate said: "Notice it! 
I thought forty battalions were moving!" While he was 
as quick as a hawk to detect a fallacy, he could be as slow 
as a ferret in pursuing a sophism through all its mazes 
and sinuosities. No lawyer, when there was a hitch or a 
blot in his cause, could keep it more dexterously out of 



372 OBATORT AJfD ORATORS. 

view, or hurry it more trippingly over; and yet, if the 
blot was on the other side, he had the eye of a lynx and 
the scent of a hound to detect and run down his game. 
With all his profusion of language, every word was used 
with discriminating accuracy, and had its precise shade 
of meaning, which made it necessary to the picture he 
drew. Though he spoke at times in thunder tones, yet 
his most telling points were often made in a low conver- 
sational voice. In a cause in which we were a witness, 
wishing to call attention to a significant point in the tes- 
timony, he stepped in front of the foreman, and said in 
low fireside tones: "About this time, gentlemen of the 

jury, you will remember that this S was seen taking 

the cars for K-e-e-n-e, N-e-w H-a-m-p-s-h-i-r-e. Stick a 
pin there, Mr. Foreman." Afterward, in denouncing the 
same person, whom he justly suspected to be the real 
plaintiff in the case, he called the attention of the jury 
to " the spectacle of a witness burning and freezing with 
all the feelings of a client," and again thundered out : 
" When he passed this check to my clients, he knew, gen- 
tlemen, that he was a bankrupt: he knew that he was a 
drowning man catching at straws: he knew that he was 
not worth the shirt he stood in. — that, had he died at 
that moment, his estate would not have yielded enough 
to defray his funeral charges.' 1 '' 

No advocate ever scanned more watchfully the faces of 
his hearers while speaking. By long practice he had 
learned to read their sentiments as readily as if their 
hearts had been throbbing in glass cases. In one jury 
address of five hours, he hurled his oratorical artilleiy for 
three of them at the hard-headed foreman, upon whom all 
his bolts seemed to be spent in vain. At last, the iron 



FORENSIC ORATORS — CHOATE. 373 

countenance relaxed, the strong eyes moistened, and Choate 
was once more master of the situation. Another of his 
peculiarities was the " fertility of his mind in possibilities 
and plausibilities, 1 ' his infinity of resources in an unex- 
pected emergency, or sudden turn of a cause, — the cool- 
ness, tact, and facility with which, like Napoleon at Rivoli, 
after his lines had been forced at all points, and the day 
had apparently gone hopelessly against him, he would 
change his front, rearrange his order of battle, and, with 
the air and bearing of one who scents a coming tri- 
umph, prepare for a fresh and fiercer onslaught on his 
astonished antagonist. 

In his literary discourses, on academic and other occa- 
sions, Mr. Choate's style differed materially from his style 
in the court-room. One of its most marked peculiarities 
was the enormous length and complexity of the sentences, 
some of which had as many joints as a boa-constrictor. 
The interminable journey on which he sometimes drove 
his "substantive and six" before he overtook the verb that 
completed the sense and the sentence, could only be paral- 
leled by the wanderings of Japhet in search of his father, 
or the never-ending travels of the Wandering Jew. Some- 
times, in listening to him, one thought of Satan's flight 
through chaos, as depicted in "Paradise Lost": 

" O'er bog or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, 
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, 
And swims or sinks, or wades or creeps, or flies. 1 ' 

Reporters complained bitterly of the difficulty of straight- 
ening out his sentences. You set out with him, they said, 
in hope and trust, and get on well over flowery meadows, 
and through mountains and thunder-storms, feeling several 
shocks of earthquake, and seeing two or three volcanic 



374 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

eruptions; but by the time he is ready to wind up the 
journey, you are so lost in the mazes of his diction, and 
so spell-bound by the grandeur and glory of his triumphal 
progress, that you have lost all sight of the starting-point: 
and, even if you can catch a faint glimpse of it, cannot 
distinguish the beginning from the middle, nor the middle 
from the end. There is a mythical story of a stenographic 
reporter, which, perhaps, only burlesques an actual fact, 
that having been so magnetized by the orator on one 
occasion that he dropped his pencil, and simply listened 
in mute astonishment,' 'he excused his neglect by saying, 
"Who can report chain-lightning ?" 

It must not be supposed, however, that in his literary 
and political addresses he dealt exclusively in these ele- 
phantine sentences. As Mr. Everett happily says, " his 
style is as often marked by a pregnant brevity as by a 
sonorous amplitude. He is sometimes satisfied in concise, 
epigrammatic clauses, to skirmish with his light troops 
and to drive in the enemy's outposts. It is only on fit- 
ting occasions, when great principles are to be vindicated 
and solemn truths told; when some moral or political 
Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that he puts on 
the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It is then 
that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensions of his 
thought; that you hear afar off the awful roar of his 
rifled ordnance; and when he has stormed the heights 
and broken the centre, and trampled the squares, and 
turned the staggering wings of the adversary, that he 
sounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle, 
and moves forward with all his thoughts in one over- 
whelming charge." 

Dryden says of Virgil, that such is the magic of his 



FORENSIC ORATORS — CHOATE. 375 

style that he makes even his husbandmen toss the dung 
with an air of dignity. In like manner the imagination 
of Choate transfigured the meanest things, and depicted 
the commonest acts in words that haunt the memory. 
Thus, in speaking of the skipper of a vessel, who was 
looking into a law-book while passing the island of St. 
Helena, he said: " Such were his meditations as the in- 
visible currents of the ocean bore him by the grave of 
Napoleon." Of a client whom a witness found crying, and 
who, when asked what was the matter, replied, " I'm afraid 
I've run against a snag," Choate sa.d? " Such were his feel- 
ings and such his actions down to that fatal Friday night, 
when, at ten o'clock, in that flood of tears, his hope went 
out like a candle." Again, speaking of a person who hesi- 
tated to commit a small offense when contemplating a 
greater crime, " Is it possible," he asked, " to think ration- 
ally that if a person was going to plunge into a cataract 
below the precipice, he would be over-careful not to moisten 
his feet with dew?" Of a witness' statement he declared 
that it was " no more like the truth than a pebble is like 
a star; or," he added after a pause, "a witch's broomstick 
is like a banner-stick." Of an unseaworthy vessel he de- 
clared: "The vessel, after leaving the smooth water of 
Boston harbor, encountered the eternal motion of the 
ocean, which has been there from creation, and will be 
there till land and sea shall be no more. She went down 
the harbor a painted and perfidious thing, but soul- 
freighted, a coffin for the living, a coffin for the dead." 
The wit of Choate was as unique as everything else 
belonging to his singular genius. The effects it produced 
were owing partly to the queer association of opposite 
ideas, and partly to the solemn and dignified, and some- 



376 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

times sepulchral utterance with which he would mask the 
point of a joke. When a counsel in a patent case said 
to him, "There's nothing original in your patent; your 
client did not come at it naturally" Choate replied, with 
a half-mirthful, half-scornful look: "What does my brother 
mean by naturally? Naturally! We don't do anything 
naturally. Wh}~, naturally a man would walk down Wash- 
ington street with his pantaloons off ! " One day he was 
interrupted in an argument by a United States judge, and 
told that he must not assume that a certain person was 
in a large business, and had made many enemies, — that 
he was a physician, and not in business. " Well, then," 
replied Choate, instantly, with a merry twinkle of the eye, 
" he's a physician, and the friends of the people he's killed 
by his practice are his enemies." Of one of his female 
clients he said: "She is a sinner, — no, not a sinner, for 
she is our client; but she is a very disagreeable saint." Not 
only does his wit exercise itself upon subjects intrinsically 
ludicrous, but even into his gravest utterances upon the 
most serious themes there is often injected a vein of humor 
or drollery which affects one like a jest on a gravestone, 
or in a ledger. Sometimes this is done unconsciously, and 
sometimes it is accompanied with a merry twinkle, — a 
queer, quizzical look, — a kind of subdued chuckle, or in- 
audible crow, — indicating a consciousness that the jest is 
good. In a railroad case the person injured by the col- 
lision of the cars with his wagon, was declared by a wit- 
ness to have been intoxicated at the time he was driving. 
When cross-examined, the witness said he knew it, because 
he leaned over him, and found by his breath that " he had 
been drinking gin and brandy." Commenting on this 
testimony, Choate said: "The witness swears he stood by 



FORENSIC ORATORS — CHOATE. 377 

the dying man in his last moments. What was he there 
for?" he thundered out. — "Was it to administer those 
assiduities which are ordinarily proffered at the bedside 
of dying men? Was it to extend to him the consolations 
of that religion which for eighteen hundred years has 
comforted the world? No, gentlemen, no! He leans over 
the departing sufferer ; he bends his face nearer and nearer 
to him, — and what does he do?" — (raising his voice to 
a yet higher key) — "What does he do? Smells gin and 
brandy!" Of the bankruptcy of a dry-goods merchant, he 
said: "So have I heard that the vast possessions of Alex- 
ander the Conqueror crumbled away in dying dynasties, 
in the unequal hands of his weak heirs." 

A good illustration of his peculiar exaggeration is fur- 
nished by a passage in his speech before a committee of 
the Massachusetts legislature on the disputed boundary 
question between that state and Rhode Island: "I would 
as soon," said he,, in a nervous tone and with startling 
energy, " think of bounding a sovereign state on the North 
by a dandelion, on the West by a blue-jay, on the South 
by a hive of bees in swarming time, and on the East by 
three hundred foxes with firebrands tied to their tails, as 
of relying upon the loose and indefinite bounds of com- 
missioners a century ago." Touching his marvelous copi- 
ousness of style, it used to be said by the Boston wits 
that he " drove a substantive and six " ; and it is related 
that when Chief-Justice Shaw, of Massachusetts, was told 
that a fresh edition of Worcester's dictionary was com- 
ing out, with five thousand new words, he said: "For 
heaven's sake, donH let Choate hear of it!" He not only 
multiplied, but sometimes repeated adjectives and other 
words with telling effect, — as when in a will case, im- 
16* 



378 ORATORY ANJ) ORATORS. 

pugning the testator's sanity, he closed a statement of the 
facts tending to establish the insanity with the sorrowing 
cadence: '"No, gentlemen of the jury, the mind of Oliver 
Smith never signed that paper. That mind was dead, — 
dead. — dead.'' Repeating the word each time with a slower 
and sadder articulation, he made a profound impression. 

One of Choate's most marvellous gifts was his power 
of so emphasizing a point verbally that a jury would 
see it clear into the roots of their optic nerves. A good 
example of this is a passage in his speech in the Tirrell 
case: A witness against the prisoner (whom Choate 
was defending), having been absent, was called out of 
turn, and after the defense was in. Commenting upon 
this procedure, Mr. Choate said: ''Where was this tardy 
and belated witness, that he comes here to tell us all 
that he knows, and all that he doesn't know, eight and 
forty hours after the evidence for the defense has been 
closed? Is the case so obscure that he has never heard 
of it? Was he ill, or in custody? Was he in Europe, 
Asia, or Africa? Was he on the Red Sea, or the Yellow 
Sea, or the Black Sea, or the Mediterranean Sea? Was he 
at Land's End, or John O'Groat's northeastern boundary, 
drawing and denning that much vexed line? Or was he 
with General Taylor and his army, or wherever the fleet- 
ing southwestern boundary line of this expanding coun- 
try may at any time happen to be? No, gentlemen, he 
was at none of these places — comparatively easy of access; 
but, — and I would emphasize upon your attention, Mr. 
Foreman, the fact, and urge it upon your consideration, 
— he was in that more incontiguous, more inaccessible 
region, — so hard to come at, and from which so few 
travelers return, — Roxbury!" (Roxbury adjoined Boston.) 



CHAPTER XIII. 



PULPIT ORATORS. 



IF one were asked who was the greatest pulpit orator 
that ever lived, it would be a nice question to deter- 
mine, so various are the styles of sacred eloquence, and 
so different are the tastes of even the most competent 
judges. But if we were to judge by the effects produced, 
we should hardly need to hesitate in pronouncing George 
Whitefield the Demosthenes of the pulpit. In reading 
his printed sermons, as in reading the speeches of Fox or 
Sheridan, we are utterly puzzled to account for their 
electrical effect. One of the latest biographers of the 
great preacher, Mr. Gledstone, is compelled to confess 
their " tameness," their "feeble thought and unpolished 
language"; and though, among the extracts he has given, 
there are a few striking and dramatic passages, they are 
neither numerous or powerful enough to discredit his 
statement. When pressed to print his sermons, Whitefield 
might well have answered with a popular French divine, 
"Gladly, provided that you print the preacher." Yet no 
fact in the history of eloquence is better attested than 
the overpowering effects of Whitefield's oratory. Even 
in his youth, when, being but twenty-one years of age, 
and deeming himself unfit for the pulpit, he had " prayed, 
and wrestled, and striven with God," that he might not 
yet be called to preach, complaint was made to his bishop 

379 



380 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

that he had driven fifteen persons mad by his very first 
sermon, — to which the worthy prelate replied that " he 
hoped the madness might not be forgotten before the 
next Sunday." 

For thirty years Whitefield was listened to with breath- 
less interest in both hemispheres. His preaching tours, 
it has been truly said, were often like triumphal proces- 
sions, in which he was escorted by bands of enthusiastic 
horsemen from place to place, and awaited at every halt 
by crowds of insatiate listeners, who could never have 
enough of his heartfelt oratory. Shut out from the Eng- 
lish churches, he turned to the open fields, 

" To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder. 

Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply, 
Its choir the winds and waves, its organ thunder, 
Its dome the sky," 

and there, with the hillside for his pulpit, harangued the 
men, women, and children, who came trooping from north, 
south, east, and west, even before daylight, to hear him. 
Preaching four times on Sunday, and on every day of the 
week, talking sometimes from seven in the morning till 
late at night, he showed no signs of exhaustion, but every- 
where and at all times subdued and charmed men by the 
spell of his fervid oratory. At Kingswood. Kensington, 
and other places, audiences of twenty, thirty, and even 
forty thousand, hung for hours on his lips; sometimes 
through pelting rain, or far into the night, standing 
around him as if entranced, and unable to tear them- 
selves away; and over all these vast assemblies he ruled 
supreme, at his will hushing them into awe-struck silence, 
or melting them to tears, or drawing from them cries and 
groans that almost drowned his voice. 

At Bristol, where the Bishop threatened him with ex- 



PULPIT ORATORS — WHITEFIELD. 381 

communication, if he should dare to wag his tongue in the 
diocese, his triumphs were no less signal. Before day the 
people might be seen going with lanterns to hear him ; and 
so vast was the throng, that men clung to the rails of the 
organ-loft, and climbed to every accessible place to get 
within reach of his voice. Even the rude colliers of the 
mining-regions, and the rabble of Moorfields, — a motley 
crowd of mountebanks, merry-andrews, and persons of the 
vilest character, — attested his spiritual triumphs. In spite 
of a furious opposition, and though the whole field, as he 
said, " seemed ready, not for the Redeemer's, but for Beel- 
zebub's harvest"; though missiles of the most offensive 
kind were hurled at him, and he was lashed at by a whip, 
assaulted with a sword, and his voice drowned at times by 
drums and trumpets; he preached for three days to a 
throng of twenty-five thousand persons, of whom three 
hundred and fifty were converted, and a thousand pricked 
in their consciences during the first twenty-four hours! 

Among the wary and thoughtful Scotch the excitement 
was no less intense. In vain did sectarian narrowness 
oppose his efforts; in vain did the Presbyterians denounce 
the revivals that followed his preaching as " a wark of 
the deevil," stigmatize him as " a false Christ," and even 
keep a fast on the occasion of his reappearance; the peo- 
ple flocked by thousands to hear him, and the stoutest 
hearts shook and trembled under his impassioned and 
electric appeals. On one occasion, we are told, as the 
night darkened over his vast audience, his word went 
through it like a shot piercing a regiment of soldiers, 
casting many to the ground, groaning and fainting under 
the vehemence of their emotions. Nor was this only when 
they were led by the great preacher to Sinai, and saw the 



382 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

lightnings flash and heard the thunders roar; far greater 
numbers were overcome when told, in the tenderest ac- 
cents, of redeeming love. Fourteen times he visited "Auld 
Scotia' 1 with the same results; and so happy was he there, 
that he called the day of his departure execution day. 

Crossing the Atlantic thirteen times, he spent nine 
years in " hunting for sinners in the wilds of America," 
and everywhere with the same results. At Boston, at 
New York, at Philadelphia, at Charleston, his words fell 
like a hammer and like fire on all who heard him. 
Some who listened to him were struck pale as death, 
others sank into the arms of their friends, and others 
lifted up their eyes to heaven and cried out to God for 
mercy. " I could think of nothing," he says on one of 
these occasions, " when I looked upon them, so much as 
the great day. They seemed like persons awakened by 
the last trump, and coming out of their graves to judg- 
ment." Opposition, instead of checking, only increased the 
impetuous flow of his speech. The men who came to scoff 
or jeer, speedily found that he was superior to the pas- 
sions of his audience, and either submitted to the spell 
of his oratory, or slunk away cheated of their sport. 

Nor was Whitefield, as Dr. Johnson supposed, merely 
the orator of the mob. Not only the unlettered, but men 
of the highest culture, yielded to the fascination of his 
speech. The cold, skeptical Hume declared that he would 
go twenty miles on foot to hear Whitefield preach; and 
in his chapel might be seen the Duke of Grafton, not yet 
pierced by the arrows of Junius, the heartless George 
Selwyn, Lord North, Charles James Fox, William Pitt, 
and Soame Jenyns. John Newton, the friend of Cowper, 
used to get up at four in the morning to hear the great 



PULPIT ORATOKS — WHITEFIELD. 383 

preacher at five; and he says that even at that early 
hour the Moorfields were as full of lanterns as the Hay- 
market of flambeaux on an opera night. So great, at 
last, was the spell, that, " when the scandal could be con- 
cealed behind the well-adjusted curtain, 'e'en mitred au- 
ditors would nod the head.' " Even the calm and unim- 
passioned Franklin caught fire at Whitefield's burning 
words; and perhaps no more signal proof of the orator's 
power could be given than its triumph over the pru- 
dence of Poor Kichard. Whitefield had consulted Frank- 
lin about the location of a proposed orphan house, but 
had refused to adopt his advice, and thereupon Franklin 
decided not to subscribe. "I happened soon after," he 
says, " to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which 
I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I 
silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had 
in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four 
silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded 
I began to soften, and concluded to give him the copper. 
Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, 
and determined me to give the silver, and he finished so 
admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the col- 
lector's dish, gold and all." 

The same sermon was heard by a friend of Franklin's, 
who, agreeing with him about the location of the house, 
had, as a precaution, emptied his pockets before he came 
from home. But, before the discourse was ended, he beg- 
ged a neighbor, who stood near him, to lend him some 
money for a contribution-/ If any men could have resist- 
ed the preacher's spell, it must have been the haughty 
and brilliant Bolingbroke, and the worldly and fastidious 
Chesterfield; yet the former, we are told, was once deeply 



384 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

moved; and the icy decorum and self-possession of the 
latter were, on one occasion, as completely overpowered 
as if he had been an English collier or a Welsh miner. 
The preacher had presented the votary of sin under the 
figure of a blind beggar, led by a little dog. The dog 
breaks his string. The old man, with his staff between 
both hands, unconsciously gropes his way to the edge of 
a frightful precipice. Step by step he advances; he feels 
along with his staff; it drops down the descent, too far to 
send back an echo; his foot trembles on the ledge; another 
moment, and he will fall headlong into the valley below, — 
when up starts the peer, crying out in an agony, as he 
springs forward to save him, "Good God! he is gone!"* 

What was the secret of this marvellous power? It lay 
partly in his extraordinary dramatic faculty, and partly 
in his burning love for the souls of sinful men. He was 
not a learned man, nor was he a profound and original 
thinker. He had apparently no Hebrew and little Greek, 
and was acquainted neither with scholastic divinity nor 
with the great divines of modern times. But he was 
profoundly in earnest, and concentrating all his faculties 
of mind, soul, and body, upon one great end, forgot every- 
thing else in his intense desire for the salvation of his 
fellow men. When to this was added the charm of his 
exquisite voice and delivery, the combination was irresist- 
ible. Whitefield had a rare dramatic genius, and it was 

* A similar testimony was once borne to the eloquence of Dr. Kirk, of 
Boston. Once, says Dr. R. S. Storrs, in his " Preaching without Notes," when 
Dr. Kirk was preaching at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, . . . " he described the way 
of worldly pleasure and gain, without thought of God, as a smooth broad road, 
along whose easy and gradual slopes men carelessly walked, till they came on 
a sudden to the precipice at the end; and so vivid was the final image, as it 
flashed from his mind upon the assembly, that when he depicted them going 
over the edge, a rough-looking man . . . rose in his place, and looked over 
the gallery front, to see the chasm into which they were falling. ,, 



PULPIT ORATORS — WHITEFIELD. 385 

aided by every other gift that could lend it force. To a 
fine person and an expressive countenance, was added a 
voice of unequalled depth and compass, whose ever-chang- 
ing melodies, as it swept over the whole scale of modula- 
tion, could be heard by thirty thousand hearers, and for 
the distance of nearly a mile. It could thunder like 
Sinai, or whisper like a zephyr, and its tones of pathos 
were such that the words, "0 the wrath to come" were 
sufficient to bring tears to the eyes of a vast audience. 
To these physical gifts were added an emotional tempera- 
ment scarcely ever possessed by any other man, — a tem- 
perament which would at one moment break out into 
passionate weeping, and at the next flash into lofty indig- 
nation, or melt into contagious tenderness, — and a feli- 
city of gesture which gave significance to every sentence, 
and brought before his audience each scene that he de- 
scribed as vividly as if it had been present to their eyes. 
His vehemence, especially, was a marked feature of his 
preaching. A poor man said that he preached like a lion. 
Sometimes he stamped, sometimes he wept, sometimes he 
stopped, exhausted by emotion, and appeared almost ready 
to expire. Of him it might be said, as of an early German 
reformer, vividus vultus, vividi oculi, vividae manus, denique 
omnia vivida. Besides all this, Whitefield had cultivated 
the histrionic art to a degree rarely attained by the most 
eminent men who have trodden the stage. Foote and 
Garrick heard him often, and they both declared that his 
oratory was not at its full height until he had repeated 
a discourse forty times. Weeding out from his sermons 
every weak and ineffective passage, and retaining all the 
impressive ones, he gradually improved them to the utter- 
most: while his delivery was so improved by frequent repe- 
17 



386 ORATOKY AND ORATORS. 

tition, — every accent, every emphasis, every modulation 
of the voice, was so perfectly toned, — that, according to 
Franklin, the effect was like that of beautiful music. So 
perfect was his dramatization, that the public, instead of 
calling him the Garrick of the pnlpit, paid him the far 
higher compliment of calling Garrick the Whitefield of 
the stage. 

In his art of rhetoric, apostrophe and personification, 
which qu) ened the coldest abstractions into life, held 
the first puree. On one occasion, after a solemn pause, he 
told his he: *:ers that the attendant angel was about to 
leave the sanctuary and ascend to heaven. "And shall 
he ascend/ 1 cried the preacher, " and not bear with him 
the news of one sinner, among all this multitude, re- 
claimed from the error of his ways?" Here he stamped 
with his foot, lifted up his hands and eyes to heaven, and 
cried aloud: "Stop! Gabriel, stop! ere you enter the sacred 
portals, and yet carry with you the news of one sinner 
converted to God! " This bold apostrophe to an imaginary 
being, as to a real messenger between earth and heaven, 
was accompanied with such animated yet natural action, 
that the philosophic Hume declared that it surpassed any- 
thing he had ever seen or heard in any other preacher. 

At another time, after exclaiming, "Look yonder! What 
is that I see?" he depicted the Savior's agony in the gar- 
den so vividly, that it seemed to be passing before the eyes 
of the congregation. "Hark! hark! do you not hear?" 
he exclaimed, as if it were not difficult to catch the sound 
of the Savior pra} T ing. Though this passage was again 
and again repeated in his addresses, it impressed those 
who knew what was coming, as though they heard it for 
the first time. Sometimes at the close of a sermon, we 



PULPIT ORATORS — WHITEFIELD. 387 

are told, he would personate a judge about to perform the 
last awful duty of his office. With his eyes full of tears, 
and an emotion that made his speech falter, after a pause 
which kept the whole audience in breathless expectation 
of what was to come, lie ^ould proceed: " I am now about 
to put on my condemning cap. Sinner, I must do it: I 
must pronounce sentence upon you!" and then, in a tre- 
mendous strain of eloquence, describing the eternal pun- 
ishment of the wicked, he would recite the wr k of Christ: 
" Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, pre- 
pared for the devil and his angels. 1 ' Whii he related 
how Peter, after the cock crew, went out and wept bit- 
terly, he had always a fold of his gown ready in which 
to hide his face. We have already mentioned how he 
startled the fastidious Chesterfield by his pictorial power. 
An equally great oratorical conquest was that in New 
York, when, preaching to the seamen, he described in 
thrilling language a ship dismantled and thrown on her 
beam ends by a squall, and at the exclamation, " What 
next?" they rose to their feet as one man, shouting out 
in their excitement, "The long boat! take to the long 
boat!" 

All this may be called acting, and, in a certain sense, 
it was acting that has never been surpassed. But it was 
more than acting, for the man personated no emotion, 
uttered no sentiment, which from the depths of his heart 
he did not feel. It was out of a soul at white heat, con- 
sumed by the love of other souls, that these imperson- 
ations sprang; and the more they offend our taste at 
times, the more they shock our ideas of the solemnity 
that belongs to holy things, the more exquisite must 
have been the skill which made them appear the lofty 



388 OKATORY AND ORATORS. 

and irrepressible outbursts of a mind carried away by its 
conceptions. Had Whitefield not been a Christian and a 
philanthropist, his tastes, in all probability, would have 
led him to the stage, where he would have rivalled or 
eclipsed Garrick. 

Though Whitefield's sermons were repeated again and 
again in his travels, even for the hundredth time, yet no 
speaker was ever quicker to seize upon any passing in- 
cident, and turn it to account. If a storm was gather- 
ing, the shadows flitting across his field congregations 
were emblems of human life; the heavy thunder-cloud 
and the flash of lightning were emblems of the day of 
wrath; and the rainbow that spanned the sky spoke of 
the grace that offered salvation in Jesus Christ. A scof- 
fer's levity would point a stern rebuke; and the peniten- 
tial tear trickling down a sinner's cheek would prompt 
a word of loving encouragement. 

It was this deep sympathy for his hearers, this intense 
love of sinful human souls, that was the great secret of 
Whitefield's power. Without it, neither his energy, nor 
his eloquence, nor his marvellous dramatic gifts, nor all 
these united, would have enabled him to work a tithe of 
the miracles he did. " If ever philanthropy burned in 
the human heart with pure and intense flame," says Sir 
James Stephen, " it was in the heart of George White- 
field." It was not the theology of his sermons, which 
was often hard, literal, and gross, but the preacher's spirit, 
that won the people's ear and heart. Plentifully " dow- 
ered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love 
of love," he lived and toiled, not for self, but for his dy- 
ing fellow-men. Love, as one of his latest biographers 
says, is more than theology, both with God and man, and 



PULPIT ORATORS — WHITEFIELD. 389 

love was never absent from any sermon of Whitefield. 
He had no preference but for the poor, the ignorant, and 
the miserable. In their cause, as they plainly saw, he 
shrank from no privation, and declined neither insult nor 
hostility; in their behalf, if necessary, he would gladly 
have died. It was the perception of this fact which, even 
more than his passionate oratory, melted the murderous 
miners at Cornwall, and caused tears to run " in white 
gutters down the black faces of the colliers, black as they 
came out of the coal-pits," at Kingwood. 

It is doubtful whether any other preacher ever im- 
pressed his hearers with so profound a conviction of his 
disinterested love for them, as Whitefield impressed on 
the hearts of the thousands that hung upon his lips. 
They knew that it was for no selfish end that he was 
wearing himself out in behalf of frail, sorrowing, per- 
plexed, and dying men; that, with the exception of brief 
intervals of repose, his whole life was consumed, so to 
speak, in the delivery of one continuous or scarcely in- 
terrupted sermon. " The parochial clergyman, in return 
for his tithes, was content to give his parishioners a sin- 
gle discourse one day in the week, under the delivery of 
which some of them were looking impatiently at the 
clock, others thinking of the price of stocks or the pros- 
pects of the next crop, and others sleeping. But here 
was a man who, without pay, was spending his life be- 
tween the saddle on which he hurried from one congre- 
gation to another, and the pulpit from which he addressed 
them, and was preaching in words of fire all over the 
kingdom, at the rate of forty and often sixty hours a 
week, — filling up the intervals with prayers and inter- 
cessions and spiritual songs, — and who called it being 



890 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

pat on short allowance, when, to save him from utter ex- 
haustion, he was limited to one a day and three times on 
Sunday.* And when this man stood before them, pouring 
out his soul in the most impassioned entreaties and appeals, 
with floods of tears, it was no wonder that a sympathetic 
thrill passed from heart to heart, and rugged natures were 
subdued, and long-sealed eyes learned to weep." 

Once, and once only, we are told, did one of Whitefield's 
hearers fall asleep. It was an old man, who sat in front 
of the pulpit, when the preacher was discoursing on a rainy 
day to a rather drowsy congregation in New Jersey. In- 
stead of sitting down and weeping, as Dr. Young did in 
a royal chapel under similar circumstances, the preacher 
stopped; his face darkened with a frown; and, changing 
his tone, he cried out: " If I had come to speak to you in 
my own name, you might rest your elbows on your knees, 
and your heads upon your hands, and sleep, and once in a 
while look up and say, ; What does the babbler talk of ? ' 
But I have not come to you in my own name. No: I have 
come to jou in the name of the Lord of Hosts, " — here 
he brought his hand and foot down with a force that made 
the building ring, — " and I must and will be heard!" The 
congregation started, and the old man woke. "Ay, ay," 
said Whitefield, fixing his eyes on him, " I have waked you 

* His panacea for his ailings was perpetual preaching: and just before he 
died, he said: "A good pulpit sweat would give me relief." 

"Given, 1 ' says Sir James Stephen, "a preacher who, during the passage 
of the sun through the ecliptic, addresses his audience every seventh day in 
two discourses of the dwarfish size to which sermons attain in this degener- 
ate age, and multiply his efforts by forty, and you do not reach the measure 
of Whitefield's homiletical labors, during each of his next five and thirty years. 
Combine this with the fervor with which he habitually spoke, the want of all 
aids to the voice in the fields and the thoroughfares he frequented, and the toil 
of rendering himself distinctly audible to thousands and tens of thousands, and. 
considered merely as a physical phenomenon, the result is amongst the most 
curious of well-authenticated marvels." 



PULPIT ORATORS — HALL. 391 

up, have I? I meant to do it. I am not come here to 
preach to stocks and stones: I have come to you in the 
name of the Lord God of Hosts, and I must, and I will, 
have an audience." There was no more sleeping or in- 
dolence that day. 

A pulpit orator of a far different stamp from the great 
Methodist who sleeps at Newburyport, was the celebrated 
Baptist preacher, the friend of Sir James Mackintosh and 
John Foster, Robert Hall. Delicate and feeble in infancy, 
and slow of perception, — unable, when two years old, to 
walk or speak, — he gave no promise of the physical and 
intellectual athlete which he afterward became. Learning 
the alphabet from his nurse on the village grave-stones, he 
became a talker almost as soon as he could speak, and pos- 
sessing himself of the signs of thought, he became at once 
a quick and earnest thinker. The stories told of his pre- 
cocity almost stagger belief. While but six years of age, 
he would steal away after school-hours to the grave-yard, 
with his pinafore stuffed with books (including an English 
dictionary, to help him understand the hard words), and 
then, spreading out his volumes on the long grass, continue 
at his studies with grave and moody face till the curfew 
sounded the knell of day. Before he was nine he read 
and re-read, we are told, " with intense interest," Jonathan 
Edwards's works on "The Affections" and "The Will"; at 
ten, he had become a prolific writer, elaborating, systema- 
tizing, and pouring forth his knowledge in the form of 
essays and sermons, which, mounted on a parlor chair, 
he preached with eloquence, solemnity and pathos to his 
brothers and sisters; and at eleven, his school-teacher 
confessed, with an ingenuous honesty which has few prece- 



392 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

dents, his utter inability to keep pace with his pupil, and 
begged that he might be removed from the school. Soon 
after this a friend of his father's was so struck with the 
boy's gift of speech, that he prevailed on him on several 
occasions to deliver a kind of sermon to a select company, 
assembled for the purpose, at his house, — " an egregious 
impropriety " which Mr. Hall in manhood could never 
recall without grief. In thinking of such mistakes of good 
men, he was wont to say with Baxter: "Nor should men 
turn preachers as the river Nilus breeds frogs (saith He- 
rodotus), when one half moveth before the other half is 
made, and which yet is but plain mud." 

It was the hearing of a sermon while attending an 
academy at Northampton which first kindled in young 
Hall's breast the flame of oratory. It is remarkable that, 
though burning and panting for oratorical renown, his 
first efforts, like those of Sheridan and Curran, were ig- 
nominious failures. Attempting an address at Broad- 
mead chapel, he "stuck" almost at the beginning. Speak- 
ing for a few minutes with facility, he suddenly stopped, 
covered his face with his hands, and sobbing aloud, " 0, 
I have lost all my ideas! " burst into a flood of tears. 
Even in this failure, however, the audience had the pene- 
tration to discover a species of triumph, declaring, as they 
went away, — " If that } r oung man once acquire self-pos- 
session, he will be the most eminent speaker of his day." 
A second trial a week after, in the same place, ended in 
a more agonizing failure. This time he did not give way 
to sobs and tears; but, springing from the desk in a kind 
of impatient rage, he hurried to the vestry. In vain did 
the deacons and other friends strive to calm his excited 
feelings; dashing out of the room, he hurried precipitately 



PULPIT ORATORS — HALL. 393 

home, and, entering his room, startled two of his compan- 
ions, who were waiting his arrival, by exclaiming, as he 
struck the table with his clinched hand, "Well, if this 
does not humble me, the devil must have me!" A third 
trial was made, and from that hour, though he shook like 
an aspen-leaf at the proposal, he began to take rank as 
the most brilliant pulpit orator of England. 

Spending four years in hard study at King's College, 
Aberdeen, he came away with a mind richly furnished, 
powerful, and intensely active, and began pouring forth 
its treasures of thought and feeling at Broadmead, Bris- 
tol. Though but twenty-one years old at this time, he 
drew crowds, including the most eminent men in the city, 
to hear him. Going next to Cambridge, he succeeded to 
Dr. Eobinson, the leader of the Evangelical Nonconform- 
ists, and during fourteen years preached to crowded houses 
with ever-increasing brilliancy and power. The magnet- 
ism of his genius penetrated beyond the narrow and con- 
ventional boundaries of sects; and senators, clergymen of 
the Established Church, and University men, from under- 
graduates to heads of colleges, gladly hung upon his lips. 
At this time the excesses of the French Eevolution were 
producing the intensest excitement in England, and Mr. 
Hall was speedily engulfed in the whirlpool. The result 
was first a powerful pamphlet "On the Freedom of the 
Press," and next an eloquent and magnificent sermon, — 
perhaps his masterpiece, — on "Modern Infidelity." With 
this powerful discourse the fame of Robert Hall attained 
its zenith. Dr. Parr, Sir James Mackintosh, statesmen of 
all parties, intellectual men of every rank and profession, 
now hastened to do homage to his genius. Undergradu- 
ates, tutors, and fellows of the University flocked in such 



394 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

numbers to hear him, that the heads of colleges became 
alarmed, and discussed the expediency of preventing it 
by an order; but Dr. Mansel, afterward Bishop, then Mas- 
ter of Trinity, the largest college, declared he could not 
be party to such a measure, and thanked Mr. Hall not 
only for his sermon, but for his powerful efforts in behalf 
of the Christian cause. The general thanksgiving which 
followed the Peace of Amiens, brought forth his splendid 
discourse on "War"; and when, a few months thereafter, 
Napoleon suddenly broke the peace, Hall delivered his 
still more masterly discourse on " The Sentiments Proper 
to the Present Crisis. 1 ' It was in this ringing sermon, 
which has all the fiery energy of a war-lyric, that he 
grandly declared England to be, in respect to the war 
waging between liberty and despotism, the very "Ther- 
mopylae of the universe." 

A still abler effort than this last was his discourse on the 
death of the Princess Charlotte, delivered at Leicester, the 
scene of his next pastorate. A nation was weeping over the 
extinction of its hopes, and genius poured out its strains 
of grief and admiration in a thousand pulpits; but not 
one of the other discourses, eloquent as many of them 
were, could for a moment compare in majesty of thought 
and diction with the tribute which this dissenter and 
radical thinker, — this reformer and friend of the people, 
— laid at the feet of a Christian princess. " In reading 
it," says a writer, " one marvels at the imperial grandeur 
of the execution, as the mighty preacher groups together 
and manages with a master-hand, and with the apparent 
ease of a child at play, the various momentous considera- 
tions which the event was fitted to awaken in a mind 
capable of a comprehensive survey." 



PULPIT ORATORS — HALL. 395 

To analyze the eloquence of Robert Hall, and point out 
the sources of its power, is not an easy task. His pub- 
lished sermons, most of which are from the scanty notes of 
his hearers, give, according to all the accounts of him, but 
a faint idea of his imperial genius. In the redistillation 
the aroma has fled. The effect is like that of " champagne 
in decanters, or Herodotus in Beloe's version." A late 
skeptical writer pronounces him " the sublimest and purest 
genius among modern divines." * For forty years he had 
no rival in the English pulpit. During this long time 
men of all sects and parties, men of the highest intellect 
and culture, the leaders of the Church, the Bar, and the 
Senate, sat with rapt attention under the spell of his 
speech. What was the secret of this attraction? Was 
it in his personal magnetism, — the majesty of his mien, 
his gestures, or the musical intonations of his voice? Or 
was it in his rhetorical skill, the exquisite arrangement 
and rhythmical flow of his periods, and the dazzling im- 
agery in which his affluent imagination clothed his ideas? 
In many of these oratorical gifts he was wanting. He had 
a large-built, robust figure, and a countenance " formed, 
as if on purpose, for the most declared manifestation of 
power"; but all his life he was a sufferer from acute 
physical pains, necessitating the use of large doses of stim- 
ulants and narcotics; his voice was weak, his action heavy 
and ungraceful, and in all the tricks of the rhetorician, 
the pomp and circumstance of oratory, he was lacking 
altogether. His style, while it has great vigor and im- 
pressiveness, is too highly Latinized to be popular; it 
abounds in technical phrases and abstract forms of ex- 
pression, and, except in certain highly-wrought passages, 

* W. R. Gregg, author of " The Creed of Christendom.''' 



396 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

is quite devoid of pictorial embellishment. It was, appar- 
ently, in no one predominant quality that his power lay, 
but in the harmony and momentum in action of all his 
faculties, — faculties which, whether of mind or heart, have 
rarely been so admirably adjusted and finely proportioned 
in any other human being. 

In natural endowment and variety of acquisition, in 
power of metaphysical analysis and in force and sweep 
of imagination, in finished scholarship and in philosophical 
culture, he was equally distinguished; and over all his 
powers of mind, natural and acquired, he had an absolute 
mastery, rendering them obedient at a nod. His eloquence 
was not the product of art, but the spontaneous outgush- 
ing of a mind full to bursting of intellectual riches, and 
of a heart burning with zeal for truth, and love for God 
and man. When he was thoroughly roused, his oratory 
was like an impetuous mountain torrent in a still night. 
He took his place among the kings of oratory, not because 
he sought for it, but because it was his by divine gift. A 
systematic reader, he was also a profound and untram- 
meled thinker, and was eloquent because he was tethered 
by no theological chain, and spoke out courageously what 
was in him, even at the risk of startling orthodox nerves. 

His manner in the pulpit was as original as the man. 
The introductory services were usually performed by an 
assistant, during which, we are told, the preacher, with 
his eyes closed, his features as still as death, and his head 
sinking down almost on his chest, presented an image of 
entire abstraction. For a moment, perhaps, he would seem 
to wake to a perception of the scene before him, but would 
instantly relapse into the same state. When he began a 
discourse, there was usually little, expression in his coun- 



PULPIT ORATORS — HALL. 397 

tenance; and sometimes, when he was not much excited 
by his themes, or was suffering from physical pain, there 
was little expression during the entire delivery. At 
other times his face would kindle as he went on, and 
toward the close would " light up almost into a glare." 
He would announce his text in the most unpretending 
manner imaginable, and, though athletic in frame, would 
speak for some minutes in a tone so low as to be barely 
audible. During even the first twenty minutes there 
would be nothing in his discourse indicating to his hear- 
ers that a giant stood before them; all the time, perhaps, 
he would be pulling the leaves of his Bible, " as if he 
were a bookbinder, engaged in taking a book to pieces, 
while his eyes would be steadfastly fixed in one direction, 
as if his whole audience were gathered into one corner 
of the room. 1 ' Presently the scene would change; his 
voice would swell from an almost unintelligible whisper 
to a trumpet peal; and when he was concluding, the ef- 
fect upon the nervous system of the listener was like 
the shock of artillery. 

One of the most obvious and noteworthy of Mr. Hall's 
characteristics as a preacher, was the total oblivion of 
self, — his utter abandonment and absorption in his sub- 
ject. " There was not the semblance of parade,' 1 says an 
American clergyman* who once heard him at Broadmead 
Chapel, — "nothing that betrayed the least thought of be- 
ing eloquent; but there was a power of thought, a grace 
and beauty, and yet force of expression, a facility of com- 
manding the best language, without apparently thinking 
of the language at all, combined with a countenance all 
glowing from the fire within, which constituted a fascina- 
* " Visits to European Celebrities," by W. B. Sprague, D.D. 



398 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

tion that was to me perfectly irresistible." John Foster, 
who often heard Mr. Hall, notes one, and only one, pecu- 
liarity of action in his friend's preaching. Under the ex- 
citement of his theme, when it rose to the highest pitch, 
he unconsciously acquired a corresponding elation of at- 
titude and expression; would turn, though not with fre- 
quent change, toward the different parts of the assembly: 
and would, for a moment, make one step back from his 
position at the last word of a climax, or at the sentence 
which decisively clinched an argument, — an action which 
inevitably suggested the idea of the recoil of heavy ord- 
nance. 

Original as Mr. Hall was, in thought and manner, he 
twice in his youth aped the manner of another. When 
he was twenty- three years old he heard Dr. Robinson, of 
Cambridge, and was so captivated that he thought he 
would copy his style, matter, and manner. Like other 
imitators, he made an utter failure. When, some years 
afterward, a friend alluded to this, Mr. Hall said: "Why, 
sir, I was too proud to remain an imitator. After my 
second trial, as I was walking home, I heard one of the 
congregation say to another, ' Really, Mr. Hall did remind 
us of Mr. Robinson.' That was a knock-down blow to 
my vanity, and I at once resolved that, if ever I did ac- 
quire reputation, it should belong to my own character, 
and not be that of a likeness. Besides, sir, if I had not 
been a foolish young man, I should have seen how ridic- 
ulous it was to imitate such a preacher as Mr. Robinson. 
He had a musical voice, and was master of its intona- 
tions; he had wonderful self-possession, and could say 
ivhat he pleased, when he pleased, and hoiv he pleased; 
while my voice and manner were naturally bad; and far 



PULPIT ORATORS — HALL. 399 

from having self-command, I never entered the pulpit 
without omitting to say something I wished to say, and 
saying something that I wished unsaid; and besides all 
this, I ought to have known that for me to speak slow 
was ruin. You know, sir, that force or momentum is 
conjointly as the body and velocity; therefore, as my voice 
is feeble, what is wanted in body must be made up in 
velocity, or there will not be, cannot be, any impression." 
At another time he tried the elephantine manner of Dr. 
Johnson: "Yes, sir, I aped Johnson and I preached John- 
son, and, I am afraid, with little more of evangelical sen- 
timent than is to be found in his essays; but it was 
youthful folly, and it was very great folly. I might as 
well have attempted to dance a hornpipe in the cum- 
brous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts 
could not sustain the load of words in which I tried to 
clothe them." But though he abandoned Johnson as a 
model, there is considerable resemblance between the struc- 
ture of his sentences and those of the author of the " Ram- 
bler." He employs simpler words and shorter sentences, 
but avails himself of " all the arts of the balance, from 
the ponderous swing to the sharp emphatic point." 

It is an interesting fact that Mr. Hall, who so habit- 
ually " spoke as he was moved," and not for effect, was, 
at one time, — probably at an early period of his life, — 
tormented by a desire of preaching better than he could; 
and yet he says that to his ear it would have been any- 
thing but commendation, had any one said to him: "You 
have given us a pretty sermon." " If I were upon trial 
for my life," he adds, " and my advocate should amuse 
the jury with his tropes and figures, burying his argu- 
ment beneath a profusion of flowers of rhetoric, I would 



400 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

say to him: 'Tut, man. you care more for your vanity 
than for my hanging. Put yourself in my place, speak in 
view of the gallows, and you will tell your story plainly 
and earnestly.' I have no objections to a lady's winding 
a sword with ribbons, and studding it with roses, when 
she presents it to her lover; but in the day of battle he 
will tear away the ornaments, and present the naked 
edge to the enemy.'' 

A striking contrast to the style of Robert Hall was that 
of the great pulpit orator of Scotland, Dr. Chalmers. It 
would be hard to name an orator of equal fame who had 
so few of the usual external helps and ornaments of elo- 
quence; and hence the first feeling of almost every hearer 
whom his fame had attracted, was a shock of disappoint- 
ment. As he rose to speak, and the hearer contrasted 
with his ideal of an orator, or with his preconceived no- 
tions, the middle-sized, and somewhat strange and uncouth 
figure before him, with its broad but not lofty forehead, 
its prominent cheek bones, and its drooping, lack-lustre 
eyes; as he observed the abrupt and awkward manner, 
apparently indicating embarrassment or irreverence, or 
both, and listened to the harsh croaking tones, the broad 
Fifeshire tongue,* while the speaker bent over his manu- 
script, and following it with his finger, read every word 
like a schoolboy, — it seemed incredible that this could be 
the man who had stormed the hearts of his countrymen 
for more than thirty years, and whose published discourses 
had rivalled in their sale the productions of the great 
Wizard of the North. All this, however, was but the 

* He pronounced " parish' ' as if it were written "paa?ish" and the words 
kk issue of which " as if they spelt " isshy of wfcUch." 



PULPIT ORATORS — CHALMERS. 401 

gathering of the clouds as a prelude to dazzling and flash- 
ing outbursts of lightning, and to the reverberating thun- 
der-peals in the heavens. Gradually the great preacher 
would unveil himself; the ungainly attitude, the constraint 
and awkwardness, the vacant look, and feebleness of voice 
and manner, would be cast aside, or if in some degree 
retained, would be overlooked by the hearer in the deep- 
ening interest of the theme; the voice, though still harsh 
and unmusical, would ring out and thrill like a clarion; 
the eye, which was so dull and half-closed, would be 
lighted up with intelligence; the breast would heave, and 
the body sway to and fro, with the tumult of the thought: 
voice and face would seem bursting with the fury of ex- 
citement, while his person was bathed with perspiration; 
the words, before so slow, would leap forth with the 
rapidity and force of a mountain torrent; argument would 
follow argument, illustration would follow illustration, and 
appeal would follow appeal, in quick succession, till at last 
all hearts were subdued, and carried captive by the flood 
of an overwhelming and resistless eloquence. 

If we may believe Mr. Lockhart, the world never pos- 
sessed an orator whose minutest peculiarities of gesture 
and voice had more power in increasing the effect of what 
he said, — whose delivery was the first, the second, and the 
third excellence of his oratory, more truly than was that 
of Dr. Chalmers. Hazlitt depicts him as looking like a. 
man in mortal throes and agonies with doubts and diffi- 
culties, and asserts that the description of Balfour of Bur- 
ley in his cave, with his Bible in one hand and his sword 
in the other, contending with the imaginary enemy of 
mankind, gasping for breath, and with the cold moisture 
running down his face, gives no inadequate idea of Chal- 
17* 



4Q2 'oratory and orators. 

mers's prophetic fury in the pulpit. Another writer was 
§0 struck with his prodigious energy, his native feral 
force, that he declares that, had it not been intellectual- 
ized and sanctified, it would have " made him, who was 
the greatest of orators, the strongest of ruffians, a mighty 
murderer upon the earth.'' 

One of the most striking features in Chalmers's ora- 
tory was his iteration. Few speakers have surpassed him 
in the ability to compose variations on a given theme, and 
it was to this that he owed much of his success in charm- 
ing the popular ear. Robert Hall declared that even 
Burke had less of this peculiarity; an idea thrown into 
the mind of the great Scotch preacher, he said, " is just 
as if thrown into a kaleidoscope. Every turn presents 
the object in a new and beautiful form; but the object 
presented is just the same. His mind seems to move on 
hinges, not on wheels. There is incessant motion, but no 
progress." One idea! — yes, but what an idea it is! "One. 
but a lion!" said the lioness in the fable, when another 
animal, that boasted of its numerous but insignificant off- 
spring, reproached her with her want of fecundity. " The 
one idea of Chalmers, 1 ' says the eloquent Bethune, " is 
worth a month's preaching from the critics who cavil at 
him." It must be admitted in the great Scotchman's 
favor, that what was only a rigid unity in his discourses 
was often confounded with an absolute sameness of ideas. 
The cast of his mind was mathematical ; and hence, in- 
stead of accumulating arguments in support of a propo- 
sition, and maintaining it by their united weight, he was 
wont to bring forward a single decisive reason, grouping 
about it all his facts and illustrations, and drawing it 
out link by link with untiring continuity and never 



PULPIT ORATORS — CHALMERS. 403 

wearying iteration. Beginning with a statement of his 
thought as a whole, he proceeded to develop it more par- 
ticularly and slowly in the subsequent parts of his dis- 
course; and because he thus adhered tenaciously to the 
one point he had in view, some critics hastily concluded 
that he had all the while been only amplifying some 
small thought with which he had started. But if he 
hurled but one idea at the audience, it was hurled with 
a giant's force, and was no pigmy thought, but " reminded 
one of the missiles thrown by the holy angels in their 
fight with Satan's legions, when they 

k Main promontories flung, which in the air 
Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions arm'd.' " 

The overwhelming effect of Chalmers's oratory is the more 
remarkable when we consider that he preached from man- 
uscript only, and, except for a brief season, did not extem- 
porize. At an early period in his career, Andrew Fuller, 
the Baptist preacher and theologian, heard him preach, 
and declared: "If that man would but throw away his 
papers in the pulpit, he might be King of Scotland." He 
threw away his papers, and again and again tried to ex- 
temporize ; but every attempt ended in failure. It was 
not that he lacked nerve, memory, intellectual energy, or 
abundance of thought; on the contrary, he suffered from 
an overmastering fluency of mind, from mental plethora. 
He used to say of himself that he was like Rousseau, 
" slow but ardent" and compared himself to a bottle full 
of liquid; when suddenly turned up, it cannot flow at 
first, from its very fullness, and only bursts and splutters. 
He therefore wisely abandoned all further attempts to ex- 
temporize, and ever afterward read his sermons, — a pro- 
cedure which would seem fatal to the electric effects they 



404 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

produced, did we not know from the examples of Newman 
Hall, George Thompson, Lord Brougham, and many other 
eloquent speakers, that a man may hold an audience with 
a manuscript as truly, if not as long and as spell-bound, 
as without one. In this matter no Procrustean rule can 
be made for all speakers ; that is the best cat which catches 
the most mice, and that is the best way of preaching, in 
a particular case, which enables one to win the most souls. 
The secret of Chalmers's success under the disadvantages 
we have named, was the intensity and impetuosity of his 
temperament, — the warm human feeling which possessed 
him, — leading him to compose, not only his sermons, but 
his other writings not intended for oral delivery, with the 
constant sense of an assemblage of people before him. 

The moment he took up his pen in the study, he 
throbbed and glowed and mentally thundered as if stand- 
ing up before the listening multitude. He had always, 
we are told, this stimulus of the great orator, even in 
the privacy of the closet, and in the silence and solitari- 
ness of midnight study. " He wrote everything to be 
spoken; he wrote everything as if he were speaking it, 
at least in feeling, if not in actual sounds; he wrote 
everything with an audience glaring in his face. Hence 
his sermons have all the advantage, all the verve and 
palpitation, of direct extempore address. They have none 
of the chilliness of discourses written before, nor the luke- 
warmness of discourses served up after the delivery. From 
the peculiarity of which we have spoken, they have all 
the pith of preparation, and all the quick leap of im- 
promptu." Not only did he write with this inspiration 
of the speaker, as if thousands were hanging upon his 
words, but he wrote with great rapidity, rarely pausing 



PULPIT ORATORS — CHALMERS. 405 

to choose his words, though spending much time upon 
the thought; and hence his discourses have "all the 
bounding liveliness of improvisation.'" 

The manuscript, from which he poured forth his ideas 
with a force and fervor rarely equaled by an impromptu 
speaker, was never thought of by those who were thrilled 
by his oratory. An old woman is reported to have said 
of him, "Ah, it's fell reading, yon!" "I know not what 
it is,' 1 said the fastidious Jeffrey, after hearing him in 
1816, " but there is something altogether remarkable 
about that man! It reminds me more of what one reads 
of as the effect of the eloquence of Demosthenes than 
anything I ever heard." The brilliant Canning, who 
went with Wilberforce, Huskisson, and Lord Binning to 
hear Chalmers, in London, in 1817, was melted to tears. 
Though disappointed at first, he said, as he left the church, 
"The tartan beats us all!" We are told that Professor 
Young, of Glasgow, scarcely ever heard Chalmers without 
weeping like a child; and upon one occasion, Dr. Hanna 
tells us, he was so electrified that he leaped up from his 
seat on the bench, and stood breathless and motionless, 
gazing at the preacher till the burst was over, the tears 
all the while rolling down his cheeks; and on another 
occasion, forgetful of time and place, — fancying himself, 
perhaps, in the theatre, — he rose and loudly clapped his 
hands in the ecstasy of his delight. 

But the most striking illustration of the great preach- 
er's power is furnished by an incident which occurred in 
Rowland Hill's Chapel, London, as the great Scotchman 
was preaching there & little after his fame had traveled 
beyond the precincts of Scotland. His audience was nu- 
merous and principally of the higher circles. Upwards of 



406 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

one hundred clergymen were present, to whom the front 
seats in the gallery were appropriated. In the midst of 
these sat Hill, in a state of great anxiety, arising from 
his hopes, and fearful lest Chalmers should not succeed 
before an audience so refined and critical. The doctor 
as usual began in his low, monotonous tone, and his 
broad provincial dialect was visibly disagreeable to the 
delicate ears of his metropolitan audience. Poor Hill 
was now upon the rack: but the man of God, having 
thrown his chain around the audience, took an unguard- 
ed moment to touch it with the electric fluid of his ora- 
tory, and in a moment every heart began to throb and 
every eye to fill. Knowing well how to take advantage 
of this bold stroke, he continued to ascend; and so majes- 
tic and rapid was his flight, that in a few minutes he at- 
tained an eminence so high that every imagination was 
enraptured. The rapid change from depression to elation 
which Hill experienced, was too much for him to bear. 
He felt so bewildered and intoxicated with joy, that un- 
consciously he started from his seat, and before his breth- 
ren could interfere, he struck the front of the gallery 
with his clinched fist, and roared out with a stentorian 
voice, — "Well done, Chalmers!" 



CHAPTER XIV. 

A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 

IN the preceding chapters of this work we have at- 
tempted to point out and illustrate the aim, power, 
and influence of the public speaker. To give to the noblest 
thoughts the noblest expression; to penetrate the souls of 
men, and make them feel as if they were new creatures, 
conscious of new powers and loftier purposes; to make 
truth and justice, wisdom and virtue, patriotism and re- 
ligion, holier and more majestic things than men had ever 
dreamed them to be before; to delight as well as to con- 
vince; to charm, to win, to arouse, to calm, to warn, to 
enlighten, and to persuade, — this is the function of the 
orator. In concluding this work, let us ask whether in 
view of the prodigious influence of his art, its cultivation 
should be neglected, as it comparatively is, both by indi- 
viduals and in our schools and colleges? We say "pro- 
digious" influence, for, after every allowance has been 
made for the supposed diminution of that influence in 
modern times, we still believe that there is no other accom- 
plishment for which there is so constant a demand in the 
church, in the senate, at the bar, in the lecture-room, at 
the hustings, and elsewhere, or which raises its possessor 
to power with equal rapidity. Some of the most fiery 
themes of eloquence may have passed away with the occa- 
sions of tyranny, outrage, and oppression that created 

407 



408 ORATORY A^D ORATORS. 

them; but though the age of " Philippics " has happily 
gone, yet so long as wickedness and misery, injustice and 
wretchedness, prevail on the earth, — so long as the Millen- 
nium is still distant, and Utopia a dream, — the voice of the 
orator will still be invoked to warn, to denounce, to terrify, 
and to overwhelm. Hobbes defined a republic to be an 
aristocracy of orators,, interrupted at times by the mon- 
archy of a single orator; and assuredly in a country like 
ours, where the grandest rewards and the proudest positions 
are the prizes open to successful eloquence, we may well 
wonder that so few strive for mastery in the race " where 
that immortal garland is to be won, not without dust and 
heat." How shall we account for this neglect? Is there 
any adequate reason why the art of persuasive speaking 
should be less thoroughly studied and understood, or less 
effectually practiced now, than at any former period in our 
country's history? Is there any necessity that the fearful 
faults in attitude, tone, and gesture, exhibited in the 
oratory of the pulpit, the bar, and the platform, at the 
present day, should be perpetuated? Is it pardonable that 
in professions whose most effective and conspicuous func- 
tion employs the voice as its instrument, there should be 
so little recognition of the importance of improving that 
instrument, and of rendering it as capable as possible of 
producing its legitimate effects? Is it necessary that the 
majority of pulpit speakers should read the hymns, as 
they do, without feeling, grace, or appreciation, as the clerk 
of a legislative assembly might properly read a bill, or 
as a lawyer's clerk might read an inventory of a bank- 
rupt's assets? Is it desirable that when they deliver 
their sermons, they should cling to the velvet cushion 
with both hands, keep their eyes glued to the written page, 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 409 

and speak of the ecstasies of joy and fear with a voice and 
face which indicate neither? Is it desirable that "every 
semi-delirious sectary who pours forth his animated non- 
sense with the genuine voice and look of passion, should 
gesticulate away the congregation of the most profound 
and learned divine" who has had a liberal education, 
" and in two Sundays preach him bare to the very sex- 
ton"? Why "call in the aid of paralysis to piety? Is 
sin to be taken from men, as Eve was from Adam, by 
casting them into a deep slumber"? 

That the cultivation of oratory is thus neglected at 
the present day, needs, we think, no proof. More than 
forty years ago a writer in the " North American Review" 
bewailed this neglect in the following words: "Anything," 
says he, " like settled, concentrated, patient effort for im- 
provement in Oratory; anything like an effort running- 
through the whole course of education, renewed with every 
day as the great object, and pursued into the discharge 
of professional duties, is scarcely known among us. The 
mass of our public speakers would as soon think of tak- 
ing up some mechanical trade or subsidiary occupation 
of life as they would think of adopting Cicero's practice 
of daily declamations. We do not believe that, on an 
average, our clergymen have spent ten weeks of prepara- 
tion on this most important part of their professional 
duties." To-day, this neglect is even more marked. Not 
a year passes but we see hundreds of young men turned 
out of our colleges whose failure in public life is assured 
in advance, because they have acquired, and probably will 
acquire, no mastery of the arts of expression. Men with a 
tithe of their knowledge and a tithe of their culture out- 
strip them in the race of life, because, though they know 
18 



410 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

less, they have been unwearied in their efforts to acquire 
the art of communicating what they know in a pleasing 
and attractive way. In many of our colleges not only is 
no provision made for the study of elocution, but the study 
is discouraged by the absorbing attention demanded by 
other studies. Skill in oratory is identified with intellect- 
ual shallowness ; and it seems to be feared that if a young 
man once begins earnestly to cultivate his voice, he is in 
danger of becoming vox et preterea nihil. A leading New 
York journal stated a year or two ago. that it knew of 
a college, the speaking of whose students at one of its 
commencements ought to have been felt by its officers as 
a burning disgrace, whose trustees, nevertheless, rejected 
the application of a teacher of reputation and experience 
to be permitted to give gratuitous instruction in that 
Jf Vanch of education, — for what reason, do you think, can- 
• reader? Not because they questioned the competency 
teacher, but because they " didn't believe in teach in g 
elocution at all!" Even in those colleges where lessons 
in elocution are given, the instruction, in many instances, 
does not exceed, during the whole four }' r ears' course, six 
weeks of teaching. — a treatment of the art which, in view 
of its difficulty and value, is only a sham and a mockery. 
In nearly all our theological seminaries the art of 
oratory is treated with similar neglect, not to say con- 
tempt. In the theological equipment of their pupils, no 
pains are spared. The newly-fledged graduate is well 
versed in church history, and knows all the shades of 
religious belief, ancient and modern. He can tell you 
who Novatus was, and who Novatian. He can tell you 
to a nicety the difference between Homoousians and Ho- 
moiusians, Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians, Monophysites and 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 411 

Monothelites, Jansenists and Molinists. He has explored 
all the transactions of the Councils of Nice, Chalcedon, 
Trent, and Dort; he can give you a minute history of all 
the controversies that have vexed the peace of the church, 
recite the sixteen articles of the Priscillian creed, and tell 
you whether filioque is properly in the creed of the Latin 
church, and what was the precise heresy of Eutyches. He 
can read Hebrew with tolerable facility, and can split 
hairs in metaphysical theology, if not with Hermaic sub- 
tilty, at least with skill enough to puzzle and baffle an 
ordinary caviller. But while he has crammed his head 
with knowledge, he has never once learned how to make 
an effectual use of his knowledge. While he has packed 
his brain with history and Hebrew and exegesis, he is 
either uneducated in the all-important art of communi- 
cating the results of his erudition in a fascinating, or t 
least, unforbidding way, or he has been instruct' *" ,j to 
despise that art. He has acted like a man whc % 

years in gathering materials for the erection of a mighty 
edifice, yet never attempts to arrange them in an order 
which will secure beauty, strength, or convenience. There 
is no doubt that many a sermon which has been written 
with burning tears in the study, has been struck, as if 
by magic, with the coldness of death in the pulpit. The 
preacher who was all alive a few hours before is trans- 
formed into a marble statue. 

What is the cause of this neglect of elocution, — wheth- 
er it is because, as has been charged, these seminaries 
" freeze the genial current of the soul," and generate a 
kind of fine, high-bred sanctified disdain of heartiness and 
enthusiasm, leading one to care more for what Quintilian 
calls an " accurate exility " than for force and fervor of 



412 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

style, — we do not pretend to decide. We are inclined, 
however, to believe that the secret of this neglect lies 
partly in an unwillingness to believe that oratory is an 
art, and that excellence in this, as in every other art, can 
be attained only by careful training, persistent painstak- 
ing, and the study of the best models, and partly in the 
illusion that because religion is the most important of 
human concerns, it needs for the enforcement of its claims 
few or no adventitious helps. Pious and worthy divines, 
as one of their number long ago declared, are too apt to 
imagine that men are what they ought to be; to suppose 
that the novelty and ornament, the charm of style and of 
elocution, which are necessary to enforce every temporal 
doctrine, are wholly superfluous in religious admonition. 
They are apt to think that the world at large consider 
religion as the most important of all concerns, merely 
because it is so; whereas the actual facts show that the 
very reverse is the case. " If a clergyman," says Sydney 
Smith, " were to read the gazette of a naval victory from 
the pulpit, he would be dazzled with the eager eyes of his 
audience, — they would sit through an earthquake to hear 
him. On the other hand, the cry of a child, the fall of 
a book, the most trifling occurrence, is sufficient to dissi- 
pate religious thought, and to introduce a more willing 
train of ideas; a sparrow fluttering about a church is an 
antagonist which the most profound theologian in Europe 
is wholly unable to overcome. " 

Since, then, men are comparatively indifferent to the 
reception of religious truth, — since they are prone, too, 
to cavil when they have the shadow of an excuse, — what 
can be more important than that every obstacle to the 
preacher's success should be removed, and that the dis- 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 418-5 

courses which they are invited to hear should be adapted 
to win and keep their attention? When will our theo- 
logical teachers learn, and act upon the conviction, that 
preaching is not philosophizing, not setting forth dogmas 
with orthodox preciseness, nor exhibiting the results of 
profound learning in Greek or Hebrew particles or idi- 
oms, — needful as these may all be, — but the earnest, 
anxious, successful manifestation of truth by the living 
voice, the eye, and the gesture, all shedding forth their 
mysterious magnetism, and compelling sympathy and con- 
viction by a profound and manifest sympathy with hu- 
man miseries and needs'? It is the fashion with some 
preachers who pride themselves on what they call their 
" solid sermons," but whose spiritual artillery, however, is 
more remarkable for bore than for calibre, to sneer at 
popular preachers, who have more eloquence than theo- 
logical learning or metaphysical acumen; but it is cer- 
tain that no man ever won the public ear without some 
genuine attraction; and it would be far better to search 
out and emulate this attractiveness than to despise it. 

The main cause, however, of the neglect of attention 
to oratory, is the heresy, — which is as pestilent as any 
theological heresy, — that eloquence is a gift of Nature 
purely, and must be left to her direction. It is foolish, 
we are told, to think of making an orator. A speaker 
may be taught to articulate his words distinctly, and to 
gesticulate, if not gracefully, at least with propriety; he 
may be taught to master his subject thoroughly, and to 
accommodate his style of speaking to his audience; and 
by continual practice he may overcome his natural timid- 
ity as well as his awkwardness, and acquire a habitual 
ease and self-possession. But when you have done all, 



414 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

you have not made an orator. Unless he have the God- 
given inspiration, the inborn genius, which predestines 
him to public speaking, he is as far from eloquence 
as any scholar in Raphael's studio, who has faithfully 
learned to draw, to mix his colors, and to lay them on the 
canvas, is from being a Raphael. In all this there is a 
large amount of truth, and (especially in the inference 
drawn from it) an equal amount of error. Of course, 
nobody supposes that a man can become an orator with- 
out a spark of oratorical genius. Mere scholasticism, 
which derives its brilliancy from the midnight oil, we 
readily admit, can never compete with the inspiration 
which springs, armed and ready, from a sudden occasion, 
like Pallas from the head of Jove. In all lofty eloquence 
there must be a great and earnest soul behind a great 
cause, appealing, with plausible, if not with profound and 
weighty reasons, to a sympathetic audience for immediate 
action. Without these essential prerequisites, the inci- 
dents of modulation, gesture, rhythm, accent, pronuncia- 
tion, and all the other adjuncts of declamation, are but 
sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. But though nature 
and circumstance may do much toward the production of 
eloquence, they cannot do all. If they can furnish the 
world with ready-made orators, why are not the orators 
forthcoming ? How happens it that all the successful 
speakers, and just in the degree that they were successful, 
have been conspicuous for their intense stud}?- of their art? 
If inspiration and spontaneity can achieve such mira- 
cles here, why not in the arts of music, sculpture, and 
painting? Why not trust to inspiration in architecture, 
also, and in landscape gardening? There are born gym- 
nasts, too, we suppose, and born marksmen, chess-players, 



A PLEA FOE ORATORICAL CULTURE. 415 

pedestrians, and boatmen. Do all these persons trust to 
the inborn faculty, to spontaneous impulse, without ap- 
prenticeship or training? Are the careful diet, the early 
hours, the daily testing of vigor and skill, the total ab- 
stinence from hurtful drinks and food, the training of the 
eye, the ear, the hand, or whatever of these or other 
means are employed, to acquire skill and ensure success, 

— are all these spontaneous actions? Does the man who 
pulls the stroke oar, or the man who disarms his oppo- 
nent at fence, do it by spontaneity? Admit to the fullest 
extent, that eloquence in its fundamental qualities, its 
groundwork, is a natural gift, yet it by no means follows 
that the speaker can dispense with art and study. Though 
the great orator must, in a certain sense, be born such, 

— though men are organized to speak well, as truly as 
birds are organized to sing, dogs to bark, and beavers to 
build, — though to be eminently successful in oratory, one 
must have a special constitution of mind and body, by 
which he is called incessantly and almost irresistibly, by 
a mysterious and inexplicable attraction that sways his 
whole being, to reproduce his mental life in this way, — 
yet he must learn his craft as slowly and as laboriously 
as the painter, the sculptor, or the musician. " To con- 
form to nature, or -rather to know when to conform," it 
has been truly said, " we should previously know what 
nature is, — what it prescribes, and what it includes." 

The truth is, those persons who talk so much about 
" born orators," and what they call " a natural and artless 
eloquence," are guilty of a transparent fallacy. Nature 
and art, so far from antagonizing each other, are often 
the self-same thing. True art, — art in the sense of an 
instrument of culture, — is drawn directly from all that 



416 oratory a:n t d orators. 

can be learned of the perfect in man's nature, and is de- 
signed not to repress or extinguish, but to develop, train, 
and extend what he already possesses. Nearly every per- 
son who has what is called the " gift " of oratory, finds 
that he has great defects associated with his native gift. 
He has a harsh or feeble voice, an indistinct articulation, 
a personal, provincial, or national twang, an awkward 
manner, a depraved taste; and instead of developing the 
divine faculty, he has been laboring to thwart and ob- 
struct it. What is more natural than that he should 
endeavor to overcome these defects, or. if he cannot get 
rid of them altogether, at least to diminish them by vocal 
exercises, by studying the best models, and by listening 
to the advice of a judicious friend? But what is all this 
but a resort to art, or the deliberate application of means 
to an end? — yet, is it art that is in the slightest degree 
inconsistent with nature? If so, then every civilized, 
every thoughtful and moral man, who represses his nat- 
ural impulses to be indolent, improvident, rude, and sel- 
fish, is so far unnatural. It is evident, therefore, that in 
admitting to the fullest extent the necessity of a natural 
manner in speaking, we do not exclude culture. When 
we say of a gentleman that he has a natural manner in 
society, we do not mean that he demeans himself like 
a savage or an unlettered boor, but the very reverse. 
We mean that he has mingled in the best society, and 
caught its ease, quietness, grace, and self-possession, till 
he reproduces them instinctively, without a thought of 
his manner, in his own deportment and bearing. When 
landscape gardeners talk of a natural style, they do not 
mean woods full of underbrush and marshes, lands bris- 
tling with sharp rocks, briers, and thistles, any more than 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 417 

they mean grounds laid out in stiff, formal plats, with 
rectangular walks, exotic plants, and trees trimmed into 
the shape of peacocks' tails. They mean grounds skill- 
fully diversified, with gentle slopes, land and water, here 
a bit of native rock and there a clump of native oaks, 
with just enough of wildness and roughness to set off 
the beauty of the lawns, and the whole so artistically, 
but not artificially arranged, as to be a copy of nature 
in her happiest moods. So a truly " natural " oratory is 
one in which the speaker's natural powers are so trained 
as to produce their happiest effect. No effort is made to 
repress his native genius, nor is he moulded and twisted 
into any conventional forms. All the culture he receives 
is based on his natural gifts, and is directed simply to 
giving them the fullest play and development, and to 
pruning away every thought or peculiarity which may 
weaken their force. 

But it is said that, somehow or other, any system of 
instruction is apt to do injury, by fettering and constrain- 
ing the intellect, and substituting a stiff, mechanical move- 
ment for the ease, flexibility, and freedom of nature. If 
this objection be just, we see not why it is not equally 
valid against instruction in vocal and instrumental music. 
The drill of the true teacher will never reappear in the 
performance of the accomplished speaker, any more than 
the food he eats will show itself unchanged in his physique, 
but will be merged in the personality of the pupil. If the 
result of oratorical training has been to make a speaker 
stiff, unnatural, and mechanical, it is either because he 
has had a poor teacher, or has but half learned his les- 
son. The fault lies not in the art, but in the imperfect 
acquisition of it. As Pascal says to those who complain 



418 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

of the grief that is intermixed with the consolations of 
the Christian's life, especially at its beginning, that it is 
not the effect of the piety which has begun in him, but 
of the impiety which still remains, so we may say of the 
bad habits which survive the best courses of instruction. 
To charge these habits upon the very systems which ex- 
pose and denounce them, is the height of paradox. The 
truth is, the tendency in young minds to some of the 
various forms of spurious and artificial eloquence is so 
deep-rooted that it resists the utmost efforts to counteract 
it; and he who ascribes this false oratory to the instruction 
which has been employed with but partial success to banish 
it, might with as much propriety say of some spot of land 
which had been but partially cultivated, and from which 
the weeds, so prodigally sown by nature, had been imper- 
fectly pulled up, " See, this comes of gardening and arti- 
ficial culture ! " Who can doubt that if the rules of any 
other art were learned as partially, and as feebly followed, 
the result would be equally unsatisfactory? 

We admit that an over-minute system of technical rules, 
— especially, if one is enslaved to them, — may, and almost 
necessarily will, have the effect which has been complained 
of. The great fault of such systems is that they attempt 
to establish mathematical rules for utterance, when they 
are as much out of place here as they would be in a treatise 
on dancing. It has been justly said that the shades of ex- 
pression in language are often so delicate and indistin- 
guishable, that intonation will inevitably vary according 
to the temperament of the speaker, his appreciation of the 
sense, and the intensity with which he enters into the 
spirit of what he utters. Some of the best elocutionists 
have differed with regard to the words on which the stress 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 419 

should fall in certain passages, and whether certain words 
should be uttered with the rising or the falling inflection; nor 
is it easy to decide between them. Some authorities insist 
that the gesture should precede the utterance of the words, 
others that it should accompany it. There are many cases 
for which no rules can provide, and even when the wit 
and ingenuity of man have done their best in devising a 
system of merely general principles, passion and emotion, 
when genuine and overpowering, will often laugh them 
to scorn. Nevertheless, there must be some great general 
principles of oratory, which should be studied and followed, 
for to question this would be to question whether men 
speak best by accident or by design, — when they take no 
thought, and when they previously consider what they 
are about to do. It has been contended, however, that 
any attempt to establish a practical system of elocutionary 
rules, is useless and absurd. Who, it is asked, would think 
of telling the pugilist that, in order to give a blow with 
due effect, he ought to know how the muscles depend for 
their powers of contraction and relaxation on the nerves, 
and how the nerves issue from the brain and the spinal 
marrow, with similar facts, requiring, perhaps, a life-time 
of study for their comprehension? "When Edmund Kean 
thrilled the heart of a great audience with the tones of 
indescribable pathos which he imparted to the words 

4 Othello's occupation is gone, 1 

it would have puzzled him to tell whether the sentence 
was ' a simple declarative ' or an ' imperfect loose.' He 
knew as little of ' intensive slides,' ' bends,' ' sweeps,' and 
'closes,' as Cribb, the boxer, did of osteology. He studied 
the intonation which most touched his own heart; and 
he gave it, reckless of rules, or, rather, guided by that 



420 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

paramount rule which seeks the highest triumphs of art 
in elocution in the most genuine utterances of nature." * 
If it be meant by this to intimate that Kean achieved 
his triumphs without toil, we have only to say that he 
himself has expressly contradicted the assertion. " People 
think," said he, " because my style is new and appears nat- 
ural, that I don't study, and talk about the sudden impulse 
of genius. There is no such thing as impulsive acting: all 
is studied beforehand.' 1 ' "Acting," says Talma, in the same 
spirit, "is a complete paradox. The skillful actor calculates 
his effects beforehand. He never improvises a burst of pas- 
sion, or an explosion of grief. The agony which appears 
instantaneous, — the joy that seems to gush forth involun- 
tarily, — the tone of the voice, the gesture, the look, which 
pass for sudden inspiration, — have been rehearsed a hun- 
dred times. No, believe me, we are not nature, but art; 
and in the excellence of our imitation lies the consum- 
mation of our skill." But our main reply to all these 
objections is that they are the stale commonplaces which 
all the enemies of systematic and accurate knowledge, 
and the eulogists of common sense and practical educa- 
tion, have been repeating since the dawn of science. They 
have been urged against all systems of logic, of rhetoric, 
and of grammar, and they might be urged with equal 
propriety and force against every treatise on music, archi- 
tecture, agriculture, chess-playing, or any other art what- 
ever. Indeed, Macaulay mocks at books of logic and rhet- 
oric, "filled with idle distinctions and definitions which 
every man who has learned them makes haste to forget. 
Who ever reasoned better," he asks, " for having been 
taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthy- 

* "The Standard Speaker.' 1 by Epes Sargent, p. 23. 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 421 

meme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and ele- 
gance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposio- 
pesis?" * To this we reply that nobody ever pretended 
that a person who masters a work on logic or rhetoric- 
will reason better at first than if he had not studied it: 
but if any of the principles it unfolds stick in his memory, 
and he afterward, consciously or unconsciously, shapes and 
corrects his conclusions, or fashions his style by them, can 
any one doubt that he reasons or writes better? 

Every art, from reasoning down to riding and rowing, — 
from speaking to fencing and chess-playing, — is learned 
by ceaseless practice; and can any sane man doubt that 
its principles will be more quickly and thoroughly mas- 
tered, and more faithfully applied in practice, if systema- 
tized, than if left to each man to discover for himself ? 
Can any one doubt that a great speaker can give a novice 
in the art many useful hints which may anticipate and 
abridge the costly lessons of experience, and save him 
both time and trouble? Is there any reason why the 
young speaker should be left to grope out his way by 
the lead-line only, when he may be provided with a chart 
and compass? A proper system of oratory or elocution 
is not a system of artificial rules, but simply a digest of 
the methods adopted and practiced by all the great orators 
who have ever lived. As to the illustration drawn from 
the pugilist, who, it is said, does not find it necessary to 
study anatomy and physiology, and learn in what way 
the muscles of the arm operate, etc., we reply that the 
example is not in point. It would be in point if any 
advocate of elocutionary or oratorical studies had con- 
tended that the young speaker should study the anatomy 

* " Trevelyan's Life/' Vol. I, p. 360. 



422 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

of the complicated organs of speech, the formation and 
action of the muscles of the arm and face, and all the 
other organs used in expression or gesticulation; but such 
advice is yet to be given. That Kean " thrilled great 
audiences," while profoundly ignorant of " slides " and 
" bends," and all the other technology of elocution, is 
doubtless true; and so it is equally true that men have 
electrified and ravished great audiences by their musical 
genius who knew nothing of counterpoint or thorough 
base, of "octaves" or " semibreves " ; that men have navi- 
gated ships across the ocean without a knowledge of 
astronomy or logarithms; and that men have raised large 
crops though they have known nothing of the constitution 
of soils, and have never even looked into a treatise on 
agricultural chemistry. 

It is doubtless true that, in some cases, men without 
special oratorical training have exhibited a might and 
majesty, a freedom and grace of eloquence, surpassing 
those of other men who have devoted years to the study 
of their art. So a Colburn or a Safford, without mathe- 
matical instruction, may solve problems over which trained 
students of inferior natural gifts may rack their brains 
in vain. So the Shakspeares, Wattses, Arkwrights, and 
Franklins, who have never had a college education, can 
achieve greater results in their callings than the vast 
majority of college graduates, with all their j^ears of pain- 
ful study and discipline. When Mozart was asked how 
he set to work to compose a symphony, he replied: "If 
once you think how you are to do it, you will never 
write anything worth hearing; I write because I cannot 
help it." But there has been but one Mozart, and even 
he must have been at some time a profound student of 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 423 

his art. Certain it is that no general rules can be drawn 
from the anomalous success of a few prodigies of genius 
that are formed to overcome all disadvantages. Even if 
we allow, what is not true, that the men whom nature 
has endowed with this heaven-born genius are a rule un- 
to themselves, and can do themselves full justice without 
instruction, the question still remains, how to improve to 
the utmost the talents of those who must be public speak- 
ers, yet have no pretensions to the inspiration of genius, 
— men on whom nobody dreams that the mantle of Cicero 
or Chatham has ever fallen. 

We sometimes hear it said that but one rule can be 
given in oratory, namely, " Be natural." But this advice, 
though correct enough, is so vague as to be utterly use- 
less. As well might a teacher of the piano tell his pu- 
pil "to be natural," and give him no directions as to fin- 
gering the keys, expecting that he will thus become a 
finished player; as well might one hope to rival Paganini 
on the violin, Stevenson as a machinist, or Blondin in 
rope-walking, by copying nature, without study, — as one 
expect, by following this vague and indefinite direction, 
to play with skill upon that grandest, most musical, and 
most expressive of all instruments, the human voice, 
which the Creator has fashioned by the union of an in- 
tellectual soul with the powers of speech. As the pianist 
or violinist must tutor his fingers to pliancy, so as to ex- 
ecute easily and instantaneously all the movements neces- 
sary for the quick production of sounds, — as the singer 
must, by ceaseless, painful drudgery, learn to master all 
the movements of his throat, — so must the orator, by dil- 
igent labor, by vocal exercises multiplied without end, 
acquire a mastery over those contractions and expansions 



424 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

of the windpipe, and over all the other organs of speech 
which modify and inflect the voice in ever} T degree and 
fraction of its scale. Then, and then only, will his voice 
be obedient to the least touch of his will; then will mu- 
sical sounds, that charm men and hold them while they 
charm, flow spontaneously from his lips, the result, never- 
theless, of the subtlest art, — " like the waters of our foun- 
tains, which, with great cost and magnificence, are carried 
from our rivers into our squares, yet appear to flow forth 
naturally." But, says one, " ; can gesture be taught or 
learned? Must I raise my hand at this point, and lower 
it at that, exactly according to rule? Would you make 
rae clock-work of mechanism?" As well might you 
Must I frame my sentences according to rule, and 
think of Lindley Murray, whenever I wish to speak?" 
Of course, all rules, to be good for anything, must be so 
familiarized as to operate spontaneously. No man knows 
how to play a piano, who stops to think which keys he 
must strike. It is only when his fingers glide from one 
key to another mechanically, automatically, with hardly a 
thought of anything but the ideas he wishes to express, 
that one has really mastered the art. The lunge that 
rids you of your adversary is the inspiration of the mo- 
ment, never the remembered lesson of the fencing-master. 
Let the young speaker master thoroughly the rules of his 
art, and his perceptions will be quick and vigorous as his 
feelings warm with delivery, and nature will prompt with 
happy exactness. He will combine the force of apt words, 
the point of finished periods, the melody of natural tones, 
and the charm of spontaneous gestures, with an air of 
fervid sincerity, which will render his oratory as~ capti- 
vating as it will be powerful and impressive. 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 425 

"But," says an objector, "is there not a great deal of 
quackery in the elocutionary profession? Does not the 
eloquent Dr. Philip Brooks say in his late Yale Seminary 
lectures, ' I believe in the true elocution teacher as I be- 
lieve in the existence of Halley's comet, which comes into 
sight of this earth once in about seventy-six years 1 ?" 
We admit that there is as much sciolism and charlatanry, 
— as much pedagogism and pedantry, — in the teaching of 
oratory as in any other department of instruction. But, 
as in other matters, we do not confound the true with 
the false, — reject the genuine with the counterfeit, — why 
should we do so here? If sagacity, good sense, and '" dg- 
ment, are required in choosing an attorney, a physici* v 
a teacher of other branches than elocution, is it a reproac* 
to sound oratorical instruction that it cannot be had 
without some care, caution, and trouble in looking for it? 

There are some public speakers who, because Nature 
has been niggard to them of her gifts, can never hope to 
reach a high standard of excellence. " There are those," 
says the eloquent Bethune, " whose attenuated length of 
limb and angularity of frame, no calisthenist could ever 
drill into grace; whose voices are too harsh and unpliant, 
or their musical sense too dull, ever to acquire a pleas- 
ing modulation; upon whose arid brain the dews of fancy 
never fall, the thoughts which grow in it being like cer- 
tain esculents without bud, blossom, or leaf, — naked, knot- 
ty, gnarled, and unseemly. Yet even these, if they cannot 
be graceful, may become less awkward; if they cannot be 
musical in utterance, they need not screech or mumble; 
or, if they have no fancy, they may cease to be grotesque 
by absurd imitations of it." Let no one, then, who has 
occasion to address his fellow-men, forego the study of 
18* 



426 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

oratory, because his gifts are small. While the highest 
oratorical genius is of rare occurrence, — as rare, as we 
have already said, as the epic or dramatic. — yet it is posi- 
tively certain that there is no other faculty whatever, 
which admits of such indefinite growth and development, 
or which may be so improved by care and labor, as that 
of public speaking. When Sir Isaac Newton was asked 
how he had discovered the true system of the universe, 
he replied: "By continually thinking upon it." In like 
manner, attention to vocal culture, — practice in elocution 
under intelligent guidance, till the voice has been devel- 
oped, — the frequent hearing of the best living speakers, 
— the living in an atmosphere of oratory, — above all. 
constant recitation in private with careful attention to 
the meaning and spirit of what one utters. — will develop 
and perfect an oratorical style in any one who has the 
gift of eloquence, even in a moderate degree; and for 
any other a thousand professors can do no more than 
teach the avoidance of positive faults. 

But too many who have the gift are apt. because they 
do not succeed at once, to be despondent and disheart- 
ened. If they were learning to play upon a flute, a 
violin, or a piano, they would not dream of drawing out 
all its combinations of harmonious sounds without years 
of toil; yet they fancy that a far more complex, more 
difficult, and more expressive instrument, the human voice, 
may be played upon with a few months' study and prac- 
tice. Coming to it mere tyros, with the profoundest ig- 
norance of its mechanism, they think to manage all its 
stops, and command the whole sweep of its vast and va- 
ried power; and finding that they cannot at once sound 
it " from its lowest note to the top of its compass," they 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 427 

heave a sigh of despair, and settle down in the convic- 
tion that they must be " Orator Mums." Men with real 
oratorical gifts are, perhaps, most likely to be thus dis- 
couraged, because the same judgment and taste which are 
needed to work up into force or beauty thoughts and 
feelings imperfectly developed, must, when coupled with 
the characteristic sensitiveness of genius, induce frequent 
misgivings as to the degree of success one has achieved. 
Too many would-be orators are like the dwellers in Ori- 
ental lands of whom Sir Joshua Eeynolds spoke in his 
address to the pupils of the Royal Academy. " The trav- 
elers in the East," he says, "tell us that when the ig- 
norant inhabitants of those countries are asked concern- 
ing the ruins of stately edifices yet remaining among 
them, the melancholy monuments of their former grand- 
eur and long-lost science, they always answer, ' They 
were built by magicians.' The untaught mind finds a 
vast gulf between its own powers and those w T orks of 
complicated art, which it is utterly unable to fathom; and 
it supposes that such a void can be passed only by super- 
natural powers." What this great painter says of his art 
is true of oratory. As Pycroft has happily observed, in 
his comment on this passage, "those who know not the 
cause of anything extraordinary and beyond them, may 
well be astonished at the effect; and what the uncivil- 
ized ascribe to magic, others ascribe to genius; two migh- 
ty pretenders, who for the most part are safe from rivalry 
only because, by the terror of their name, they dis- 
courage in their own peculiar sphere that resolute and 
sanguine spirit of enterprise which is essential to success. 
But all magic is science in disguise; let us proceed to 
take off the mask, — to show that the mightiest objects of 



428 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

our wonder are mere men like ourselves; have attained 
their superiority by steps which we can follow; and that 
we can, at all events, walk in the same path, though there 
remains at last a space between us. 11 

Lord Chesterfield went so far, in his letters to his son, 
as to tell him that any man of fair abilities might be an 
orator. The vulgar, he said, look upon a fine speaker as 
a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiar 
gift of heaven. He himself maintained that a good 
speaker is as much a mechanic as a good shoemaker, 
and that the two trades were equally to be learned by 
the same amount of application. This is an extreme 
view, and yet if by " orator " we mean not Cicero's mag- 
nificent myth, who unites in himself every possible accom- 
plishment, but simply a pleasing and persuasive speaker, 
his lordship was much nearer the truth than those who 
are frightened from all attempts to speak by the bugbear 
of " want of genius." Chesterfield himself was an illus- 
tration, to some extent, of his own theory, for he declares 
that he succeeded in Parliament simply by resolving to 
succeed. He labored indefatigably to perfect himself not 
only in public speaking but in conversation, and Horace 
Walpole says that he was the first speaker of the House. 
If a schoolboy were required to name the most illustrious 
example of defects subdued and excellence won by un- 
wearied perseverance, he would name Demosthenes. His 
discouragements would have appalled an ordinary man. 
Constitutionally feeble, so that he shrank from the vigorous 
physical training deemed so essential in a Greek education, 
he also, as we have seen, stammered in his youth, — the 
most unlucky infirmity that could befall a would-be ora- 
tor. He passed two or three months continuously in a 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 429 

subterranean cell, shaving one side of his head that he 
might not be able to show himself in public, to the inter- 
ruption of his rhetorical exercises. At last he overcame 
his defect, so that he was able to articulate the stubborn 
guttural most plainly. " Exercitatione fecisse ut plenis- 
sime diceret." Still, having the most critical and fastidi- 
ous assembly in the world to speak before, he was hissed 
from the bema in his early efforts, and retired to his 
house with covered head and in great distress, yet not 
disheartened. At one time he was returning to his home 
in deep dejection, when Satyrus, a great and popular actor, 
entered into conversation with him. Demosthenes com- 
plained that though he was the most painstaking of all 
orators, and had nearly ruined his health by his intense 
application, yet he could find no favor with the people, 
and even drunken seamen and other illiterate persons 
were preferred to him. " True," replied the actor, " but 
I will provide you with a remedy, if you will repeat to 
me some speech in Euripides or Sophocles." Demosthenes 
complied, and then Satyrus recited the same speech in 
such a way that it was like a revelation to him. Aided 
by such hints, and urged on by his own marvellous indus- 
try, he by-and-by achieved a distinct success in the law 
courts, and at last became the most renowned of orators. 
In all this we see little that is suggestive of a heaven- 
born genius. No doubt Nature had planted in him the 
germ of oratory; but it was grown and matured only by 
the intensest labor and the most ceaseless care, — such 
labor and such care as would enable any man with fair 
natural abilities to " sway listening senates " and win 
verdicts from juries. 

The great Roman orator subjected himself to a train- 



430 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

ing as severe as that of the famous Greek. His life is 
before us in his works; and from them it appears that 
he directed all his energies to the cultivation of elo- 
quence, the absorbing passion of his life. Placing himself 
under the instruction of Molo the Rhodian, he declaimed 
daily in the presence of some friend, sometimes in his 
native language, but oftener in Greek, a language with 
which he was perfectly familiar, and of which he trans- 
ferred some of the rich luxuriance to his more unadorned 
and meagre native tongue. He was, apparently, master 
of logic, ethics, astronomy, and natural philosophy, besides 
being well versed in geometry, music, grammar, and, in 
short, every one of the fine arts. It was from no unas- 
sisted natural gifts, but from deep learning and the united 
confluence of the arts and sciences, that, as Tacitus affirms, 
the resistless torrent of that amazing eloquence derived 
its strength and rapidity. 

If we read the biographies of the great modern orators, 
we shall find their success to have been owing to similar 
causes. They have all been deeply impressed with the 
truth of Cicero's maxim, " magnus dicendi labor, magna 
res, magna dignitas, summa autem gratia." (Pro Murena, 
13.) From Chatham downward, not one of them has 
become an adept in the art of persuading his fellow-men 
without a careful and persistent adaptation of means to 
the end. When Robert Walpole first spoke in the House 
of Commons, he paused for want of words, and could only 
stutter and stammer. " What future promise," it was 
asked, " was there in that sturdy, bull-necked, red-faced 
young member for Castle Rising, who looked like the son 
of a small farmer, and seemed by his gait as though he 
had been brought up to follow the plough?" It is not 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 431 

surprising that the brilliant and accomplished Henry St. 
John (Lord Bolingbroke), whose first speech on the same 
evening was loudly applauded, laughed at the idea of his 
old schoolfellow ever becoming his competitor. Yet in 
spite of this bad beginning, Walpole lived to falsify all 
these croakings, and to become by practice and painstak- 
ing a powerful debater. If ever a man was born with 
great oratorical powers, and could afford to dispense with 
all helps to success, it was Lord Chatham. Yet even he, 
the king of British orators, did not trust to the gifts of 
which Nature had been so prodigal, but, as we have al- 
ready seen, labored indefatigably to improve them by study 
and discipline. As a means of acquiring copiousness of 
diction and precision in the choice of words, he submitted 
to a most painful task. He went twice through a large folio 
dictionary, examining each word attentively, dwelling on 
its various shades of meaning and modes of construction, 
thus endeavoring to bring the whole range of our noble 
and affluent tongue completely under his control. His 
son, William Pitt, toiled still harder to perfect his natural 
gifts; and they were so sharpened by ceaseless practice 
that failure in his case would have been more wonderful 
than success. According to Lord Stanhope, when he was 
asked to what he principally ascribed the two qualities 
for which his eloquence was conspicuous, — namely, the 
lucid order of his reasonings and the ready choice of his 
words, he answered that "he believed he owed the former 
to an early study of the Aristotelian logic, and the latter 
to his father's practice of making him every day, after 
reading over to himself some passage in the classics, trans- 
late it aloud and continuously into English prose." Not 
only did these rhetorical exercises receive a large share 



432 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

of his attention, but he was assiduous in his efforts to 
cultivate and improve his powers of elocution. By long 
practice he was able at last " to pour forth a long suc- 
cession of round and stately periods without premedita- 
tion, without ever repeating a word, in a voice of silver 
clearness, and with a pronunciation so articulate that not 
a letter was slurred over." " Probably no man of genius 
since the days of Cicero," says Professor Goodrich, " has 
ever submitted to an equal amount of drudgery." 

Of the silver-tongued Murray, — " the great Lord Mans- 
field," as he was called in his own time, — him whose words 
" dropped manna," who " spoke roses," it was said by Bish- 
op Hurd, that though his powers of genius and invention 
were confessedly of the first size, yet " he almost owed 
less to them than to the diligent and studious cultivation of 
his judgment." Distinguished at school more for his excel- 
lence in declamation than in any of the other exercises, he, 
nevertheless, spared no pains to improve his natural gifts, 
and studied oratory with the utmost zeal and diligence. 
" Those who look upon him with admiration as the antag- 
onist of Chatham," says Lord Campbell, " and who would 
rival his fame, should be undeceived if they suppose that 
oratorical skill is merely the gift of nature, and should 
know by what laborious efforts it is acquired." He read 
everything that had been written upon the principles of 
oratory, and familiarized himself with all the great masters 
of ancient eloquence. He also diligently practiced original 
composition, and spent much time in translation. Cicero 
was his favorite writer, and he used to declare that there 
was not a single oration extant of this great forensic and 
senatorial orator which he had not translated into Eng- 
lish, and, after an interval, according to the best of his 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE 433 

ability, re-translated into Latin. To give him skill in 
extemporaneous speaking, lie joined a debating society at 
Lincoln's Inn, where the most abstruse legal points were 
elaborately discussed. For these exercises he prepared him- 
self beforehand so thoroughly and minutely, that his notes 
proved of great service to him afterward, both at the bar 
and on the bench. Mastering in succession ethics, the 
Roman civil law, international law, the feudal law, and 
the English municipal law, he still found time, amid all 
these multifarious and severe studies, to attend to his 
oratorical exercises, and even, as Boswell expresses it, to 
"drink champagne with the wits," and cultivate elegant 
literature. Among his early acquaintances was Alexander 
Pope, who was struck with admiration by his rare accom- 
plishments, and, above all, by the silvery tones of his voice, 
which was one of the most noticeable peculiarities of his 
subtle and insinuating eloquence. It is related that one 
day, a gay Templar having unceremoniously entered his 
room, young Murray was surprised in the act of practic- 
ing oratory before a glass, while the poet sat by in the 
character of an instructor. Such were the toils of one 
of those " born orators," who are vulgarly supposed to be 
able to dispense with labor. Who does not see that it 
was by intense study and self- discipline that Mansfield 
acquired his masterly art of putting things, — that art 
which, as Lord Ashburton said, " made it exceedingly diffi- 
cult to answer him when he was wrong, and impossible 
when he was right." 

That Burke, with all his transcendent genius, was a 

prodigious worker, no other proof is required than his 

works themselves. " The immense labor which he bestowed 

upon all he did,'" says an able writer, " was. his constant 

19 



434 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

boast. He disclaimed superior talent, and always appealed 
to his superior industry. ... By incessant labor he could 
at last soar at any moment to his highest elevation, as 
though it had been his natural level. His innate genius 
was wonderful, but he improved it to the uttermost. B} T 
reading and observation he fed his rich imagination: to 
books he owed his vast and varied knowledge; from his 
extensive acquaintance with literature he derived his inex- 
haustible command of words; through his habits of inces- 
sant thought he was enabled to draw the inferences which 
have won for him the renown of being the most sagacious 
of politicians; and by the incessant practice of composition 
he learned to embody his conclusions in a style more 
grandly beautiful than has ever been reached by any other 
Englishman with either the tongue or the pen." 

So great and so long continued are the labors necessary 
to make an orator that it is probable there never was a 
successful speaker who did not acquire his mastery by 
the constant torment of his hearers. Charles James Fox 
acquired such skill and readiness in speaking, that he 
could begin at full speed, and roll on for hours without 
fatiguing himself or his audience. His mind was so richly 
supplied with knowledge, and so charged with intellectual 
heat, that it needed but collision with other minds to flash 
instantaneously into light. But even his talents had been 
gradually developed by practice. He made it a point to 
speak every night in Parliament, for his own improvement: 
and we are told by Lord Holland, his nephew, that in 
whatever empWment or even diversion he was engaged, — 
whether dress, cards, theatricals, or dinner, — he would ex- 
ercise his faculties with wonderful assiduity and attention 
till he had reached the degree of perfection he aimed at. 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 435 

Canning was almost equally laborious in his efforts to 
perfect himself in the oratorical art. When he was 
about to make an important speech, his whole mind was 
absorbed in it for two or three days beforehand. " He 
spared no labor," we are told, " either in obtaining or in 
arranging his materials. He always drew up a paper 
(which he used in the House), with the heads, in their 
order, of the several topics on which he meant to touch, 
and these heads were numbered, and the numbers some- 
times extended to four or five hundred.' 1 '' Minute points of 
accuracy and finish, which many other orators would have 
disdained to look after, received his sedulous and careful 
attention. The severity of Curran's oratorical training 
reminds one of that of the old Greeks. Rarely has so 
great an advocate been made out of such unpromising- 
materials. Small in stature, with no feature but a spark- 
ling eye to redeem his mean appearance; with a harsh 
voice, a hasty articulation, and an awkward manner: 
known at school as " stuttering Jack Curran," and in a 
debating society to which he belonged as " Orator Mum," 
on account of a failure in his first speech; he resolved, 
nevertheless, to overcome all these disadvantages: and 
overcome them he did so completely, that they almost 
passed out of men's recollections. To gain a stock of 
ideas, he spent his morning " in reading even to exhaus- 
tion," and gave the rest of the day to literary studies. 
A portion of his time was given to the classics, of which 
he became passionately enamored, — especially of Virgil. 
He carried a copy of the latter always in his pocket, and, 
during a storm at sea, his biographer found him crying 
over the fate of the unhappy Dido, when every other per- 
son on board would have seen Dido hung up at the yard- 



436 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

arm with indifference. He made himself familiar with the 
whole range of English literature, and not only learned 
to speak French like a native, but read every eminent 
author in that language. While pursuing these studies 
with indefatigable zeal, he was unremitting in his efforts 
to perfect himseif as a speaker. Constantly on the watch 
against bad habits, he practiced daily before a glass, recit- 
ing passages from the best English orators and authors. 
Speaking often in debating-clubs, in spite of the laughter 
which his early failure provoked, he at last surmounted 
every obstacle. " He turned his shrill and stumbling 
brogue into a flexible, sustained, and finely-modulated 
voice; his action became free and forcible; and he acquired 
perfect readiness in thinking on his legs." — in a word, he 
became one of the most eloquent and powerful forensic 
advocates that the world has seen. 

Erskine, Brougham, Pulteney, Grattan, Gladstone, — all 
the leading orators of Great Britain, whatever their gen- 
ius, — labored with equal diligence to perfect themselves 
in the art of speaking. The same industry, — as could 
easily be shown, had we space for examples, — has distin- 
guished the most celebrated French orators. Count Mon- 
talembert, one of the most eloquent Frenchmen of the 
present century, when he was attending school at La- 
Roche, Guyon, in 1827, wrote thus to a friend, at the age 
of seventeen, concerning his oratorical exercises: "You 
would laugh heartily, my dear friend, if you could but 
see me in one of my rambles, whilst I follow one of my 
favorite pursuits, — declamation. By times, in the depths 
of the woods, I begin an extempore philippic against the 
cabinet ministers; and all at once, thanks to nry near- 
sightedness, I find myself face to face with some wood- 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 437 

cutter or peasant girl, who stares at me in amazement, 
and probably looks upon me as a madman just escaped 
from a Bedlam. So, quite ashamed of myself, I take to 
my heels; and once more set to work at gesticulating 
and declaiming." 

The orators of America are no exception to the rule 
touching the price of excellence. Not one of them, whose 
biography has been given to the public, has found the 
road to success " a primrose path of dalliance." We have 
many fifth-rate speakers who, having boundless confidence 
in their native gifts, scorn the drudgery of a long ap- 
prenticeship to their art, and trust on each occasion, not 
to a careful preparation, but to " the inspiration of the 
hour," confident that they will find something to say on 
their themes, when they have " fairly warmed up to them." 
But no American orator whom the people flock to hear, 
relies on the inspiration of the occasion, unless it is 
strengthened and intensified by that surer, deeper, and 
more trustworthy inspiration which comes from years of 
self-culture and from conscientious preparation for each 
oratorical effort. The half-educated young lawyer or rep- 
resentative to the legislature may dream over the fancied 
possession of intuitive powers which he never displays; 
but those who have entered the arena and engaged in 
the contest, know that mental vigor can come only from 
discipline, and skill from persevering practice. 

If there is one American orator more than another, 
who might be supposed to have derived his inspiration 
from his own "heaven-born genius" and the excitement 
of the hour, rather than from hard study, and who 
seemed able to embody fervid feelings in vivid and glow- 
ing language without the slightest effort, it was Henry 



438 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

Clay. But though endowed with the greatest natural 
gifts, he was no exception to the rule that orator fit. He 
attributed his success not to sudden illuminations while 
speaking, but mainly to the fact that he began at the age 
of twenty-seven, and for years continued the practice of 
daily reading and speaking upon the contents of some 
historical or scientific book. " These off-hand efforts," he 
says, " were sometimes made in a cornfield, at others in 
the forest, and not unfrequently in some distant barn, 
with the horse and ox for my auditors. It is to this 
early practice in the great art of all arts, that I am in- 
debted for the primary and leading impulses that stimu- 
lated me forward, and shaped and moulded my subsequent 
entire destiny. Improve, then, young gentlemen, the su- 
perior advantages you here enjoy. Let not a day pass 
without exercising your powers of speech." We have al- 
ready seen what efforts Pinkney and Wirt made to per- 
fect their oratorical styles. The latter, with all his flu- 
ency and constant experience in debate, would never speak, 
if he could help it, without the most laborious prepara- 
tion ; and for extemporaneous after-dinner speeches, in 
particular, he had a mortal horror. He was a diligent 
student of literature as well as the law, — especially of 
Bacon, Boyle, Hooker, Locke, and the other fathers of 
English literature, among the moderns, and among the 
ancients, of Quintilian, Seneca, and Horace; and a pocket 
edition of the latter poet, well thumbed and marked, was 
his constant companion upon his journeys. " He was al- 
ways," says one who knew him, "a man of labor; occa- 
sionally of most intense and unremitting labor. He was 
the most improving man, also, I ever knew ; for I can 
truly say that I never heard him speak after any length 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 439 

of time, without being surprised and delighted at his im- 
provement, both in manner and substance." In a letter 
to a young law-student, he gives this advice: " I would 
commit to memory and recite a la mode de Garrick, 
the finest parts of Shakspeare, to tune the voice by culti- 
vating all the varieties of its melody, to give the muscles 
of the face all their motion and expression, and to acquire 
an habitual use and gracefulness of gesture and command 
of the stronger passions of the soul. I would recite my 
own compositions, and compose them for recitation ; I would 
address my own recitations to trees and stones, and falling 
streams, if I could not get a living audience, and blush 
not even if I were caught at it." 

Daniel Webster was a prodigy of physical and intel- 
lectual endowment; but his greatest gift was a prodigious 
capacity for hard work. Far from furnishing encourage- 
ment to those who trust to their inborn powers of ora- 
tory, he furnishes one of the most striking of the thou- 
sand illustrations of the truth that the greatest genius, 
like the richest soil, yields its choicest fruits only to the 
most careful tillage. He told Senator Fessenden that the 
most admired figures and illustrations in his speeches, which 
were supposed to have been thrown oif in the excitement 
of the moment, were, like the "hoarded repartees" and cut- 
and-dry impromptus of Sheridan, the result of previous 
study and meditation. On one occasion he told, with ex- 
traordinary effect, an anecdote which he had kept pigeon- 
holed in the cells of his brain for fourteen years, wait- 
ing for an opportunity to use it. The vivid and pictur- 
esque passage on the greatness and power of England, — 
than which neither Burke nor Chatham ever conceived 
anything more brilliant, — was conceived and wrought out 



440 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

years before it was delivered, while its author was stand- 
ing in the citadel at Quebec, listening to the drum-beats 
that summoned the British soldiers to their posts. Mr. 
Webster once told his friend Peter Harvey that his great 
speech in reply to Hayne, which was generally supposed 
to have been delivered without preparation, had been sub- 
stantially prepared long before, for another but not dis- 
similar occasion, so that when he was called upon sud- 
denly to defend the honor of New England against the 
fiery Carolinian's attacks, he had only to turn to his " notes 
tucked away in a pigeon-hole," and refresh his memory 
with his former well-weighed arguments and glowing 
periods. As he himself said, he had only to reach out 
for a thunderbolt, and hurl it at him. " If Hayne had 
tried," he said, " to make a speech to fit my notes, he 
could not have hit it better. No man is inspired by the 
occasion; I never was." At another time, being questioned 
by a young clergyman about his speeches which were 
delivered upon the spur of the moment, Mr. Webster 
opened his large eyes, with apparent surprise, and ex- 
claimed, "Young man, there is no such thing as extempo- 
raneous acquisition!" "The word 'acquisition,'" remarks 
Mr. Harvey, " was exceedingly well chosen. Mr. Webster 
knew that there was extemporaneous speaking every day. 
What he evidently intended to convey was, that knowl- 
edge could not be acquired without study; that it did 
not come by inspiration or by accident." Even in writ- 
ing a brief letter, or note of presentation in a volume, 
he was fastidious in his choice of words and phrases, try- 
ing different forms of expression again and again before 
he could satisfy his severe and exacting taste. 

Edward Everett, the most scholarly of all our public 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 441 

speakers, was unwearied in his efforts to improve his ora- 
torical talents. Not only did he write out his speeches 
with the most fastidious care, but he took great pains to 
perfect his gestures and the mechanism of his voice. 
Persons who knew him well, say that even till he was 
sixty years old, you might have heard from his library, 
in the . hush of evening, the low tones of familiar talk in 
which he was practicing his utterances for the platform. 
Of course, it is possible, as that speaker did latterly, to 
carry this too far. We would counsel no person to waste, 
his vitality in the study of petty effects, as Everett did 
when he pressed his handkerchief to his eyes so many hun- 
dred times at precisely the same point in his eulogy on 
Washington; or when he wrote to a friend and asked 
whether, if, in a certain passage in a lecture which he 
was about to give, he should put his finger into a tum- 
bler of water, and allow the water to trickle off drop by 
drop, it would produce an effect on the audience. Tricks 
like these are too transparent, and are not to be con- 
founded with the study of natural and appropriate ges- 
tures. Everett was the last of the artificial school of 
orators who practiced them, and even he, with all his 
splendid rhetoric, lived to see the wane of his artificial 
power before the hard sense and sturd}'' realism of the 
nineteenth century. 

In nine cases out of ten persons who object to elocu- 
tionary studies and exercises, are thinking not of the 
legitimate results of such a training, but of extreme cases 
like that of this great rhetorician. It is not so much to 
elocutionary skill that they object, as to the artistic air 
which kills everything, — to a manner perfectly shaped by 
conscious skill and regulation. There are few who will 



442 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

not agree with them that if a speaker so trained gets to 
be absolutely faultless, that is about the greatest fault 
possible, and that, after such an exhibition, it is even re- 
freshing, as Dr. Bushnell says, '"to imagine the great 'bab- 
bler' at Athens jerking out his grand periods, and stam- 
mering his thunder in a way so uncouth as to become 
a little contemptible to himself." Far preferable to the 
over-finished and artificial oratory of Everett, who had 
mastered every art of elocution but that of concealing 
art, was the more natural and spontaneous, though at 
times bizarre and eccentric, oratory of Rufus Choate. The 
most accomplished advocate of America, he was a splen- 
did illustration of what laborious culture and systematic 
self-training can do. Never, for a moment, did he think 
of trusting to native genius or the inspiration of the oc- 
casion in his speaking. Forensic eloquence was the study 
of his life, and for forty years he let no day pass without 
an effort to perfect himself in the art of addressing his 
fellow-men. Far from sneering, as so many do, at the 
teachings of the elocutionist, he said to one of his stu- 
dents, — "Elocutionary training I most highly approve of; 
I would go to an elocutionist myself, if I could get time. 
... I have alwaj^s, even before I first went to Congress, 
practiced daily a sort of elocutionary culture, combined with 
a culture of the emotional nature?' In the symmetry of 
his training, and the incessant zeal with which he strove 
to develop, invigorate, and discipline every faculty of mind 
and body, he reminds us of the ancient Greeks. Of no 
man can it be more truly said that his genius was mainly 
"science in disguise." 

Of all the living pulpit orators of America, Henry 
Ward Beecher is confessedly one of the most brilliant. 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 443 

The son of a great pulpit orator, endowed with the rarest 
and most versatile abilities, he, if any man could do so, 
might dispense, one would suppose, with a tedious and 
protracted training in the art of speaking. But what do 
we find to have been his education? Did he shun the 
professors of elocution, believing, as do so many of his 
brethren, that oratory, like Dogberry's reading and writ- 
ing, comes by nature? No, he placed himself, when at 
college, under a skillful teacher, and for three years was 
drilled incessantly, he says, in posturing, gesture, and 
voice-culture. Luckily he had a teacher who had no faith 
in Procrustean systems, and never cared to put "Prof. 
Lovell, his x mark " on his pupils, but simply helped his 
pupils to discover and bring out what was in themselves. 
Later, at the theological seminary, Mr. Beecher continued 
his drill. There was a large grove between the seminary 
and his father's house, and it was the habit, he tells us, 
of his brother Charles and himself, with one or two oth- 
ers, to make the night, and even the day, hideous with 
their voices, as they passed backward and forward through 
the wood, exploding all the vowels from the bottom to 
the very top of their voices. And what was the result 
of all these exercises? Was it a stiff, cramped style of 
speaking, or was it omnis effusus labor? " The drill that 
I underwent," says this many-sided orator, "produced, not 
a rhetorical manner, but a flexible instrument, that ac- 
commodated itself readily to every kind of thought and 
every shape of feeling, and obeyed the inward will in the 
outward realization of the results of rules and regulations." 
How signally do the examples we have cited illustrate 
the truth of Sir Joshua Reynolds's remark that the effects 
of genius must have their causes, and that these may, for 



444 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

the most part, be analyzed, digested, and copied, though 
sometimes they may be too subtle to be reduced to a 
written art ! They pi we conclusively, we think, that the 
great orators, of ancient and modern times, have trusted, 
not to native endowments, but to careful culture; that it 
was to the infinitus labor et qiwtidiana meditatio, of which 
Tacitus speaks, that they owed their triumphs; that, mar- 
vellous as were their gifts, they were less than the igno- 
rant rated them; and that even the mightiest, the elect 
natures, that are supposed to be above all rules, conde- 
scended to methods by which the humblest may profit. 

In answer to all this, some one may cite the "natural 
oratory' 1 of Abraham Lincoln, who owed as little to books 
and teachers as perhaps any man of equal eminence. But 
even he did not win his successes without toil. His finest 
effort, the immortal Gettysburg speech, — which, brief as it 
is, will be read and remembered long after Edward Ever- 
ett's ambitious oration, which occupied hours in the deliv- 
ery, shall have been forgotten, — was prepared with extra- 
ordinary care. According to the statement of Mr. Noah 
Brooks, his friend, it was written and re-written many 
times. The same conscientious painstaking, even in the 
veriest trifles, distinguishes all the great actors and public 
readers who have won the ear of the public. It is said 
that a person once heard a man crying " murder," in the 
room under his own, in a hotel, for two hours in succession. 
Upon inquiry, he found that it was Macready, the trage- 
dian, practicing on a word, to get the right agonized tone. 
A gentleman in Chicago,* who has had occasion to learn 
some of the secrets of Charlotte Cushman's mastery of her 
art, tells us that she never, in her public readings, read 

* Mr. George B. Carpenter. 



A PLEA FOR ORATORICAL CULTURE. 445 

the pettiest anecdote, or even a few verses, without the 
most careful and laborious preparation. On one occa- 
sion, in Chicago, she prepared heiself for an encore by 
selecting a comic negro anecdote that met her eye, which 
filled about twenty lines in a newspaper. For three or 
four days she read and re-read this story in her private 
room, trying the effect of different styles of recitation, 
now emphasizing this word, now that, now pitching her 
voice to one key and now to another, till she had discov- 
ered what seemed to be the best way to bring out its 
ludicrous features into the boldest relief. When Rachel 
was about to play in Paris a scene from " Louise de Lig- 
nerolle," she spent three hours in studying it, though it 
comprised but thirty lines. Every word was rehearsed in 
all possible ways, to discover its " truest and most pene- 
trating utterance." So true is it that the greatest geniuses 
in every art invariably labor at that art far more than 
all others, because their very genius shows them the neces- 
sity and value of such labor, and thus helps them to per- 
sist in it! So true is it that whether in oratory, poetry, 
musre, painting, or sculpture, no artist attains to that ex- 
cellence in which effort concealed steals the charm of intu- 
ition, unless he is totus in illo, — unless, as Bulwer says, 
" all which is observed in ordinary life, as well as all which 
is observed in severer moments, contributes to the special 
faculties which the art itself has called into an energy so 
habitually pervading the whole intellectual constitution, 
that the mind is scarcely conscious of the work which it 
undergoes 1 '! The prodigies of genius, so far from being 
favored by nature and allowed to dispense with toil, would 
probably, as Professor Channing, of Harvard, says, show 
to us, their short-sighted worshipers, were they able to 



446 ORATORY AND ORATORS. 

reveal to us the mystery of their growth, a far more thor- 
ough course of education, a more strict, though perhaps 
unconscious obedience to principles, than even the most 
dependent of their brethren have been subjected to. 

We say, then, to the reader, — Would you wield the 
mighty power, — the thunderbolt, — of oratory ? Listen to 
the words of Salvini, the great actor, to the pupils in 
his art: ''Above all, study, — study, — study. All the genius 
in the world will not help you along with any art, unless 
you become a hard student. It has taken me years to 
master a single part.' 1 The same performer is now occu- 
pied with the role of King Lear, which he says it will take 
him two years to study thoroughly. To speak as Nature 
prompts, — to give utterance to one's thoughts and feel- 
ings in appropriate tones and with appropriate gestures, — 
seems too easy to require much labor. But, as it has been 
well observed, simple as truth is, it is almost always as 
difficult to attain as it is triumphant when acquired. It 
is said that one day a youth walked into the studio of 
Michael Angelo in his absence, and with a bit of chalk 
dashed a slight line on the walL When the great master 
returned, he did not need to ask who had visited him; the 
little line, as true as a ray from heaven, was the unmis- 
takable autograph of Raphael. Doubtless in every profes- 
sion there are men who leap to the heights without much 
training; but Ave know not how much higher they might 
have risen, had they added all possible acquired ability 
to the gifts of nature. " Where natural logic prevails 
not," says Sir Thomas Browne, " artificial too often faileth; 
but when industry builds upon nature, we may expect 
Pyramids," 



INDEX. 



Acting, "impulsive," 420. 
Actors, when most successful, 113, 

114. 
Adams, John, his eloquence, 18. 
Addison, his failure in oratory, 

187. 
Ames, Fisher, his study of the 

Scriptures, 167; his eloquence, 

180. 
Apostrophe, examples of, 95. 
Aristotle, on metaphors, 104. 
Athens, its oratory, 33. 
Automatic action of the mind, 

191, 192. 



Bacon, Lord, his oratory, 197, 226. 

Baron, the actor, 114. 

Baxter, Richard, saying of, 128. 

Beecher, Edward, D.D., anecdote 
of, 87. 

Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, on 
the voice, 87; his elocutionary 
training, 442, 443. 

Beranger, 187. 

Berry er, M., 86. 

Betterton, the actor, saying of, 
110. 

Bolingbroke, Lord, his oratory, 
13, 227-232; his style, 188, 228- 
230; his natural and acquired 
talents, 227, 228 ; Chatham's 
opinion of his eloquence, 228; 
his invective, 229 ; excluded 
from Parliament, 229; his writ- 
ings, 231; Brougham's opinion 
of his oratory, 231. 

Bossuet, his eloquence, 22-24; on 
the death of Henriette Anne 
d'Angleterre, 28; his classical 
studies, 167; his study of the 



Bible, 167; his preparation of 
a sermon, 180. 

Bourdaloue, his eloquence, 22. 

Brooks, Philip, D.D., quoted, 128. 

Brougham, Lord, his physical con- 
stitution, 64; on speaking, 86; 
his voice, 134; on the test of 
oratorical power, 136; his power 
in reply, 137; recommends the 
practice of translation, 171; his 
use of the pen, 179, 184; his 
style, 188; his oratory described, 
258-267; his energy, 91, 92, 258; 
his faults, 259, 260; his force 
in assault, 260; his irony, 
sarcasm, and invective, 261; his 
personal appearance, 261, 262; 
his speech on Law Reform, 262; 
his felicity in description, 262; 
his invective against Pitt, 263; 
his speeches on Negro Emanci- 
pation, 263, 264; his power as 
an advocate, 264, 265 ; his speech 
in defense of Williams, 265- 
267; his contrast of Burke with 
Demosthenes, 274. 

Bulwer, Sir Henry L., on the 
House of Commons, 205. 

Burgess, Tristam, anecdote of, 
146. 

Burke, Edmund, his speech at 
Hastings's trial, 15, 16; on the 
oratory of his own age, 32; his 
quotations from the classics, 59; 
his voice, 74; a master of meta- 
phor, 104; his popularity as a 
speaker, 134; his readiness in 
retort, 155 ; insulted in the 
House of Commons, 155; his 
quotations from the poets, 166; 
unpopular as a speaker, 204; 
his invectives, 216; his oratory 



447 



448 



INDEX. 



described, 268-275, 300; his en- 
cyclopaedic knowledge, 268 ; his 
imagination, 269; his prejudices, 
269: his oratorical defects, 270- 
273; criticised by Henry Rogers, 
271; his lack of delicacy, 272; 
his speech on the Nabob of 
Arcot's debts, 273-275 ; on Sher- 
idan's eloquence, 281 ; his labo- 
rious self-culture, 433, 434. 
Bushnell, Horace, D.D., on the 
dearth of eloquent ministers, 



Caffarelli, 77. 

Calhoun, John C.,his logical mind, 
139; his personal appearance 
and manner in speaking, 312, 
313; debate with Clay in 1840, 
313-315; his mental and moral 
qualities, 321. 322; contrasted 
with Webster and Clay, 321, 
322. 

Calmness, its advantages in ora- 
tory, 119, 120. 

Canning, George, his speech on 
Portugal, 16; on Parliamentary 
oratory, 47; his irony, 121; his 
first speech in the House of 
Commons, 145; his use of the 
pen, 179; his oratory charac- 
terized, 251-258; his personal 
appearance, 252; his early 
speeches, 252; his failure in 
declamation, 253; his excessive 
elaboration, 253, 254; extracts 
from his speeches, 255-258; his 
knowledge of finance, 255; his 
wit, 256; his contests with 
Brougham, 261 ; his preparation 
for speaking, 435. 

Carlyle, Thomas, on Daniel Web- 
ster's eyes, 323. 

Castlereagh, Lord, 225. 

Chalmers, his oratory, 22; his 
massiveness of frame, 65; his 
manner of speaking, 134; his 
failure in extempore speech, 
148; his oratory characterized, 
400-406; his personal appear- 
ance and manner, 400-402; his 
iteration, 402, 403; his failure in 



extempore preaching, 403; illus- 
trations of his power, 405, 506. 

Chatham, Lord, his influence as 
an orator, 14 ; his voice, 74, 233 ; 
his force, 91, 234; his oratorical 
frenzy, 109; his fastidiousness 
and painstaking, 133, 232; his 
treatment of Erskine, 152; rous- 
ed by opposition, 157; his trans- 
lations, 170 ; his oratory not 
always successful, 207; his per- 
sonalities, 215, 216; character- 
ization of his oratory, 232-239 ; 
his lack of learning, 233; his 
force of assertion, 234; anecdotes 
of, 234-236; his wordiness and 
iteration, 236, 237; described by 
Wilkes, 238; his oratorical self- 
culture, 431. 

Chesterfield, Lord, his transla- 
tions, 170; on the House of 
Commons, 204; on oratory, 428. 

Choate, Rufus, on Webster's elo- 
quence, 36; on abstractions in 
oratory, 103; his oriental looks 
and style, 138; his nervousness. 
150; his study of literature and 
words, 166, 167; on translation, 
171; his admiration of Pink- 
ney, 175; commends the use of 
the pen, 183; his success with 
juries, 210; his oratory charac- 
terized, 365-378; his personal 
appearance, 366, 367; his ener- 
gy, 367; his defenses of crimi- 
nals, 369; his triumph over 
Boston prejudice, 369, 370; his 
dialectic skill, 371; his skill in 
jury cases, 371-373; his long 
sentences, 373; his style de- 
scribed by Everett, 374; ex- 
tracts from his speeches, 375; 
his wit, 376, 377 ; his exaggera- 
tion, 377; his copiousness of 
style, 377; his emphasis, 378; 
his oratorical training, 442. 

Chrysostom, his classical studies, 
165, his eloquence, 22. 

Cicero, power of his oratory, 12, 
13; on the eloquence of Demos- 
thenes, 68; his intense feeling, 
109; on Asiatic oratory, 137; his 



INDEX. 



449 



nervousness and timidity in 
speaking, 147, 148; his severe 
oratorical training, 429, 430. 

Clay, Henry, his voice, 75, 134, 
319; his oratory described, 311- 
322; his personal appearance, 
311, 312, 319; his debate with 
Calhoun in 1840, 313-315; his 
slender education, 316, 317; his 
success as a lawyer, 318; his 
partial failures in speech- mak- 
ing, 319; his absorption in his 
themes, 319; his speech at Lex- 
ington, after leaving Congress, 
320; his oratorical training, 437, 
438. 

Climate, its effect on eloquence, 
137-139. 

Cobden, Richard, his first speech, 
144. 

Coleridge, S. T., saying of, 158. 

Congress, the U.S., its personali- 
ties, 215. 

Conversation, an aid to oratory, 
190. 

Curran, John Philnot, his phys- 
ical vigor, 65; his skill in cli- 
max, 102; his metaphors, 105; 
on the use of tropes, 107; his 
wit, 121; his first speech, 144; 
his readiness, 153; his use of 
the pen, 179; his defenses of 
political prisoners, 207, 208; his 
oratorical studies, 435, 436. 

Cushman, Charlotte, her painstak- 
ing, 444. 



D'Alembert, on oratory, 10. 

Demosthenes, his voice, 80; his 
force, 91 ; saying of, 112; his toil, 
133; his careful preparation for 
speaking, 185 ; his triumph over 
difficulties, 428, 429. 

De Quincey, Thomas, on tautology 
in popular oratory, 197, 198; on 
the inspiration of organists, 339. 

Dewey, Orville, D.D., his elocu- 
tion, 86. 

Discourses, contrast between 
spoken and printed, 193-200. 

Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Bea- 
39* 



consfield), his sarcasms, 123, 
218, 219. 



Edwards, Jonathan, his power in 
the pulpit, 24. 

Eldon, Lord, 150. 

Elocution, objections to its study, 
89, 419-423, 421. 

Eloquence, the study of speci- 
mens, 172-174; its tests, 193- 
213; is in the audience, 203; 
inconsistent with deep think- 
ing, 203-205; contrasted with 
wisdom, 204; a relative term, 
212, 213, 281; cannot be re- 
ported, 316; not a gift of nature 
purely, 413-417. (See Oratory.) 

Emerson, R. W., on oratory, 10, 
50; on the eloquence of a Bos- 
ton preacher, 24; on insincerity 
of speech, 113, 128. _ 

Emmet, his misquotation, 61. 

Emmons, Nathaniel, D.D., 108. 

Energy moratory, 89-102; a char- 
acteristic of Demosthenes, Chat- 
ham, and Brougham, 91, 92, 
258; also of John Marshall, 92; 
increased by interrogation, 94, 
95; by exclamation and apos- 
trophe, 96; by gesture, 95; by 
expression of countenance, 99 
dependent on choice and num- 
ber of words, 100; should be 
accrescent, 101, 102. 

Erskine, Harry, 153, 154. 

Erskine, Lord, his physique, 65, 
358; his skill in climax, 102; 
on the source of eloquence, 109; 
his wit, 123; his embarrass- 
ment in his maiden speeches, 
144; his sensitiveness to annoy- 
ance, 151, 152; his study of 
English literature, 166,347; his 
use of the pen, 180; on repeti- 
tion, 197; his success in jury 
addresses, 207, 208; his opinion 
of one of Burke's speeches, 272; 
his oratory characterized, 346- 
359; his early education, 347; 
his speech in defense of Baillie, 
348-352; his rapid success, 357; 



450 



INDEX. 



his defense of Lord George Gor- 
don, 352; his speeches on the 
state trials, 352; extracts from 
his defense of Stockdaie, 352, 
353 ; his speech on the trial of 
Paine, 354; his oratorical ex- 
cellences, 354-358; his knowl- 
edge of the human mind, 356; 
his study of the feelings of 
juries, 356; his concentration 
in argument, 358; his personal 
magnetism, 358; his speeches 
commended as models, 359. 

Everett, Edward, contrasted with 
John B. Gough, 135; his mem- 
orizing of his speeches, 176, 
177; his description of Web- 
ster's appearance when reply- 
ing to Hayne, 333, 334; his 
oratory described, 337-345; his 
fastidious preparation of his 
speeches, 337-338; his polished 
rhetoric, 339 ; his lack of aban- 
donment, 339; his speeches, 
"stand-up essays," 340; his 
phrases contrasted with Web- 
ster's, 340; his oratorical mer- 
its, 341-345; his style, 341, 342; 
passages from his speeches. 342; 
the variety of his discourses, 342, 
343; his first Phi-Beta-Kappa 
oration, 343; his Plymouth and 
Concord addresses, 343; his eu- 
logy on La Fayette, 344; his 
looks, voice, and gestures, 344; 
his self-culture and preparation 
of his speeches, 440, 441. 

Exclamation, 95. 

Expression of countenance, 99. 



Fenelon, Archbishop, his oratory, 
22. 

Ferguson, of Pitfour, anecdote of, 
46. 

Follett, Sir William, 149. 

Force in oratory, see Energy. 

Forsyth, William, on forensic ora- 
tory in England, 36. 

Foster, John, on Lord Chatham's 
force, 91; on Robert Hall's 
preaching, 398. 



Fox, Charles James, his ignorance 
of political economy, 47; his 
earnestness, 112; his oratory 
weakened by his immoralities, 
126, 127 ; his manner, 134; his 
classical studies, 165; his fail- 
ure as a writer, 187; on speeches 
that read well, 195; his advice 
to Romilly, 197 ; his oratory 
characterized, 244-251 ; his early 
training, 244; his passion for 
gaming, 245; his love of Ital- 
ian literature, 245; his love of 
argument, 247; his painstak- 
ing, 247; his habits of dissipa- 
tion, 248; his ignorance of phi- 
losophy and political economy, 
249; his power in reply, 249; 
his social qualities, 249 ; his wit, 
250; contrasted with Pitt, 250, 
251; his practice of speaking, 
434. 

Franklin, Dr. Benjamin, on the 
importance of honesty to an 
orator, 125, 126. 

French and English oratory com- 
pared, 212. 

G 

Gardiner, Wm., on loud tones, 85. 

Gavazzi, 96. 

Gesticulation, 95-98; Quintilian 
on, 96-97; Daniel Webster's, 
96; excessive, 98; faults of, 98, 
99. 

Gibson, J. Milner, M.P., his wit, 
120; on the House of Commons, 
204. 

Gladstone, Sir William, his classic 
quotations, 62; his voice, 75; as 
a speaker and writer, 188. 

Goethe, on beauty, 129; on writ- 
ing and speaking, 193. 

Gough, John B., and Edward 
Everett contrasted, 135. 

Grattan, Henry, his emulation of 
Chatham, 174; his retort upon 
Flood, 216, 217; on Chatham's 
eloquence, 233; his oratory char- 
acterized, 287-293; his admira- 
tion of Chatham, 287; his pri- 
vate declamations, 287 ; his 



INDEX. 



451 



natural defects, 287, 288; de- 
scribed by Mr. Lecky, 288; his 
grandeur, 288; his excellences 
and faults, 289-290, 300; pas- 
sages from his speeches, 290- 
292; on C. J. Fox, 291; a born 
orator, 292. 

Gray, the poet, saying of, 114. 

Guido, 90. 

Guthrie, Thomas, D.D., contrast 
between his spoken and printed 
sermons, 199. 

H 

Hall, Robert, his oratory charac- 
terized, 391-392; his precocity, 
391; his early failures in the 
pulpit, 392; his education, 393; 
his popularity, 393; his principal 
sermons, 393, 394; his personal 
appearance, 395; the secret of 
his power, 395, 396; his manner, 
396; his self-abandonment; his 
imitation of Doctors Robinson 
and Johnson, 398, 399 ; on tropes 
and figures, 399; on Chalmers's 
iteration, 402. 

Hamilton, Alexander, 182. 

Hamilton, W. G., his advice to 
public speakers, 183, 184. 

Handel, the composer, his sensi- 
bility, 114, 115. 

Hastings, Warren, his trial, 15, 16. 

Hazlitt, William, on Burke's style, 
104; on speakers and writers, 
202; on eloquence and wisdom, 
204. 

Head, Sir Francis, on Indian ora- 
tory, 26. 

Henry, Patrick, his speech on 
"the tobacco case," 17,303,304; 
his speech on American inde- 
pendence, 18; his affectation, 
133 : his timidity as a speaker, 
148; his coolness in crises, 157; 
a proof of his eloquence, 210; 
his oratory characterized, 301- 
311; his defective education, 
301; his distaste for labor, 302; 
his taste for reading and the 
study of character, 302; his first 
law case, 303, 304; his speech 



on the Stamp Act, 304, 305; his 
speeches in support of Ameri- 
can independence, 305-307; his 
speech on the British refugees, 
307; his ridicule of John Hook, 
307,308; his personal appear- 
ance and manner, 308, 309; his 
success in jury trials, 310; com- 
pared with Chatham, 310. 
House of Commons, the oratory 
successful in, 204, 205; person- 
alities in, 214-219. 

I 

Imagery, excessive, 106. 

Imagination, essential to the ora- 
tor, 103-107; repressed by the 
din of the age, 107. 

Indignation, a stimulus to elo- 
quence, 221. 

Inspiration, the result of previous 
toil, 186. 

Instruction, not necessarily inju- 
rious in oratory, 417-419; may 
be over- technical, 418, 4i9. 

Interrogation, 94, 95; employed 
by Cicero and Demosthenes, 94, 
95. 

J 

Jefferson, Thomas, his voice, 77; 
on Mirabeau, 92. 

Jeffrey, Lord, his timidity as a 
speaker, 148. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, not fitted for 
oratory, 188. 

K 

Kean, Edmund, his voice, 79; his 
ignorance of elocutionary rules, 
419, 420, 422. 

Kemble, John, anecdote of, 114. 

Kennedy, J. P., his anecdote of a 
novitiate, 144. 

King, Dr., 165. 

Kirk, Edward, D.D., his elo- 
quence, 384. 



Labor the price of excellence, 426. 
Laurence, Dr. French, his elocu- 
tion, 88. 
Law (Lord Ellenborough), 60. 



452 



INDEX. 



Lecky, W. E. H., on Grattan's 
oratory, 288; on O'Connell's, 
296. ^ 

Legouve, M., his anecdote of 
Rachel, 77; on the voice of 
actors, 78; on the influence of 
love on articulation. 80; on M. 
Andrieux's voice, 82, 83. 

Lincoln, Abraham, his Gettysburg 
speech, 444. 

Lowell, J. R., on Webster's elo- 
quence, 21. 

Luther, Martin, 13; sayings of, 
221, 259. 

M 

Macaulay, Lord, on the House of 
Commons, 48, 205; not able in 
reply, 137; his mauvaise honte, 
149; his oratorical habits, 181; 
on the personalities in Parlia- 
ment, 217 ; contrasted with 
Sheil, Grattan, and Burke, 299, 
300; on logic and rhetoric, 420. 

McDuffie, of South Carolina, his 
assault upon Trimble, 219, 220. 

Mackintosh, Sir James, 47, 187, 
201. 

Macready, William, 444. 

Magnetism, personal, 111. 

Malibran, Madame, 79. 

Mansfield, Lord, his lack as an 
orator, 112; cowed by Chatham, 
157; his translations, 170; his 
oratory, 173, 213.; his study of 
oratory, 432, 433. 

Marshall, Thomas, M.C., 158. 

Massillon, 22. 

Memorizing speeches, 176-184. 

Metaphors, 104-106; Burke's, 104, 
105; Curran's,105; Shell's, 105; 
Plunket's, 106. 

Mirabeau, his oratory.14, 15; his 
physical gifts, 64; his voice, 75; 
his manner, 134, 149; stimulated 
by opposition, 157; his elocu- 
tion, 195 ; superbest in his rages, 
222. 

Montalembert, De, Count Charles, 
his study of British eloquence, 
174; his elaboration of his 
speeches, 180; on his oratorical 
exercises, 436. 



Monvel, French actor, 82. 
Mozart, saying of, 422. 

N 

Napoleon I, on his generalship, 
131; his tactics at Austerlitz, 
203. 

Naturalness, how attained, 185. 

Nature and art in oratory, 413- 
425. 

North, Lord, his wit, 122, 223. 



O'Connell, Daniel, his massive 
frame, 65; his voice, 75; his wit, 
121, 122; his blarney, 201; on 
great speeches, 206 ; his elo- 
quence in Parliament, 206, 207; 
his versatility, 213; his coarse 
sarcasms. 225: his oratory de- 
scribed, 293-299; his skill as an 
advocate, 293-295; his coarse- 
ness and pow er of invective, 295 ; 
his sarcasm on Disraeli, 295 ; his 
qualities as a popular orator, 
296-298; his merits and defects. 
298-299. 

Orator, the, qualifications of, 63- 
139; both born and made, 66; 
his physical qualifications, 63-5, 
69; vulgar qualities sometimes 
useful to. 70; knowledge needed 
by, 72, 73; his voice, 73-89; 
power of the "natural," 92, 
93 ; why the radical is success- 
ful, 93; his need of force, 89- 
102; his need of imagination, 
103-107; his need of sensibility, 
107-121; his need of wit, 120- 
125; his trials, 140-160; his 
need of presence of mind, 150; 
his need of courage and pa- 
tience, 160; his helps, 161-192; 
conviction his aim, 173 ; should 
listen to best speakers, 174; 
aided by the pen, 175-185; ad- 
vised not to memorize an en- 
tire speech, 177, 178; aided by 
conversation, 190; needs self- 
confidence, 190; aided by "un- 
conscious cerebration," 191; his 



IKDEX. 



453 



use of philosophy and logic, 196; 
must often repeat his state- 
ments, 196-199; persuasion his 
chief aim, 200; cannot be a 
first-rate man, 202; causes of 
his failures, 208-211; the rarity 
of great ones, 68, 69; the defects 
of some celebrated ones, 69; two 
classes of modern, 70; great ones 
appear in clusters, 71; why ner- 
vous before audiences, 141-144; 
English political, 226-267; Irish 
political, 268-300 ; American 
political, 301-345; forensic, 346- 
378; pulpit, 379-406; contrasted 
with the rhetorician, 336, 337. 
Oratory, its power and influence, 
9-29; D'Alembert and Emer- 
son on, 10; its triumphs imme- 
diate, 10; its influence in Greece 
and Rome, H7I3; power of 
Cicero's, 12; its influence in the 
Dark Ages, 13; its triumphs in 
America, 17-21; triumphs of 
sacred, 21-24; its power to-day, 
24-25; not confined to civilized 
lands, 26; its perishableness, 
26-29; not a lost art, 30-62; its 
supposed decay in France, 31 ; 
lamentations on its decline, 30, 
31; the chief sources of, 32; 
Tacitus on, 33; Athenian, 33; 
Roman, 33, 34; contrast be- 
tween ancient and modern, 34- 
45, 52 ; decline of forensic, 36, 37 ; 
ancient and modern forensic com- 
pared, 36-38; ancient training 
in, 39; regarded by the ancients 
as a fine art, 39; how affected 
by the printing-press, 40, 44, 45 ; 
now addressed to the general 
public, 42; the kind demanded 
to-day, 42, 48, 49, 100, 101; 
how affected by reporting, 43; 
how affected by party spirit, 45, 
46; its changes within a cen- 
tury, 46-48, 59-62; no longer a 
passport to office, 47; Sir J. 
Mackintosh and Canning on 
Parliamentary, 47; decried in 
England, 48; in the House of 
Commons, 48, 49; not now a 



useless art, 49-58; its new dowry 
of power, 51; of the platform 
and lecture-room, 51, 52; its 
statuary and millinery no longer 
potent, 52; why comparatively 
cold to-day, 52-54; its influence 
not diminished in modern times, 
54; its effects to-day gradual, 
55, 56; how affected by charac- 
ter, 56, 57; its advantages to- 
day, 57, 58; change in Parlia- 
mentary, 58-62; the qualifica- 
tions it demands, 63-139; comes 
by inspiration, 66, 67; examples 
of spontaneous, 66, 67; not the 
result of precepts and labor 
merely, 67; Socrates on, 67; su- 
perior to music and painting, 97 ; 
when most triumphant, 115 ; its 
essential secret hidden, 129-136 ; 
its many varieties, 132, 135; 
test of power in, 136, 137; ef- 
fect of climate on, 137-139; the 
study of specimens commended, 
172-174; superiority of spoken, 
193-200; its proper style, 195; 
lies in the ear of the hearer, 197 ; 
qualities of the Greek, 198; its 
objects, 200; may be too pro- 
found, 202; not always tested 
by its success, 205, 208; not re- 
cognized when perfect, 209-212; 
French and English compared, 
212; British during the Com- 
monwealth, 227; changes in 
English, 252; its abhorrence of 
lengthiness and philosophic 
discussion, 270-271; "Web- 
sterian," 324; dependent on the 
excitement of debate, 339; a 
plea for its culture, 407-446; its 
general neglect, 407-413; its 
influence, 407, 408; neglected 
in colleges and theological sem- 
inaries, 410; objections to its 
study considered, 413-425; may 
be taught too technically, 418; 
persons who cannot excel in it, 
425 ; how skill in it may be at- 
tained, 426; Lord Chesterfield 
on skill in, 428. 
Otis, James, his eloquence, 17. 



454 



IXDEX. 



Paganini, 85. 

Palmerston, Lord, 214. 

Pantomime, 73, 74. 

Parker, Theodore, on impressive 
speaking, 73. 

Parliamentary oratory, changes in 
British, 46-49, 59-62. 

Parsons, Theophilus, C. J. of 
Mass., his pleading, 210. 

Party spirit, its effects on oratoiy, 
45,46. 

Peel, Sir Robert, his power in 
reply, 137; assailed by Disraeli, 
218, 219. 

Pen, the, use of commended, 175, 
184. 

Personalities in debate, 214-225. 

Philip of Macedon, saying of, 12; 
his offer for an orator, 50. 

Phillips, Wendell, his elocution, 
87, 88. 

Pinkney, William, his manner 
when speaking, 150; his atten- 
tion to literature, 166; his use 
of the pen, 182; his oratory 
characterized, 360-365; his 
painstaking. 360, 361 ; his study 
of the English language, 360; 
his vehemence, 361; his legal 
arguments, 363; his personal 
appearance, 363; his haughti- 
ness, 363; his dandyism, 363, 
364; his fondness for theatrical 
effects, 364; extract from his 
" Nereide " argument, 365. 

Pitt, William, the younger, why 
successful as a speaker, 44; his 
quotations from the classics, 59, 
60; his voice, 74; his sarcasm, 
121 ; his eloquence strengthened 
by his integrity, 126; his stately 
elocution, 134, 242; his readi- 
ness in an emergency, 154; his 
reading of the poets, 165; his 
translations, 170; his oratory 
described, 239-251; his preco- 
city, 239; his education and 
training, 239-241 ; his mock de- 
bates, 241; his maiden speech, 
241; compared with Chatham, 
242; his sarcasm, 243; his ear- 



nestness, ib. ; described by Lord 
North, 243 ; on Fox's social 
qualities, 250; denounced by 
Brougham, 263 ; rebuked by 
Sheridan. 277: his oratorical 
studies, 431, 432. 

Plunket, Lord, 106, 180. 

Political orators, 226, 345. 

Porter, D.D., on his voice, 80. 

Preachers, why unsuccessful, 109. 

Preaching defined, 413. 

Prentiss, Sargent S., 138. 

Press, the, its influence on oratory, 
40, 44, 45. 

Priestly, Dr. Richard, 224. 

Prose, has its melody as well as 
poetry, 164. 

Pycroft, Rev. James, quoted, 472. 

Q 

Quackery in elocutionary teach- 
ing, 425. 

Quarterly Review, London, on 
eloquence, 209. 

Quintilian, on conversational pub- 
lic speaking, 81. 

Quotation, classic, 58-62, 235. 

R 

Rachel, anecdote of, 77; her pains- 
taking, 445. 

Randolph, John, 69. 

Reading, commended to orators, 
161-168. 

Repetition, in oratory, 196-199. 

Reply, power in, a test of ora- 
torical force, 136, 137. 

Review, North American, quoted. 
409. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, quoted, 427. 
443. 

Rhetoric, why in disrepute, 211. 

Rhetoricians contrasted with ora- 
tors, 336. 

Rhythmus, 161-164. 

Robertson, Rev. F. W., 118. 

Rogers, Henry, on Burke's ora- 
tory, 271. 

Rome, its oratory, 33, 34. 

Rules, elocutionary, must be fa- 
miliarized, 434. 



INDEX. 



455 



Russell, Lord John, 213; his cour- 
tesy, 219. 

S 

Sainte-Beuve, C. A., on the voice, 
76, 77; on Montalembert's 
speeches, 180. 

Salvini, the actor, quoted, 446. 

Savonarola, his eloquence, 22. 

Scarlett, Sir James (Lord Abin- 
ger), 211. 

Scipio Africanus, 52. 

Sensibility, essential to the orator, 
107-120, 143; excess of, 116, 
120, 143; its veiled expression 
most powerful, 118. 

Shakspeare, quoted, 119. 

Sheil, Richard Lalor, his voice, 
69; his rapid delivery, 134; 
quotes Exodus, 168; his elab- 
oration, 180; compared with 
Macaulay, 299. 

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, his 
ignorance of finance, 47; on 
Rowland Hill, 109; on Fox's 
earnestness, 112; his good sense 
and wit, 121 ; his untrustworthi- 
ness, 128; his failure in his first 
speech, 144; his sarcasm upon 
Brougham, 260; his oratory de- 
scribed, 275-286; criticised by 
De Quincey, 276; his appear- 
ance and manner, 276; his wit, 
277,281-285; his rebuke of Pitt, 
277; his speeches on Hastings's 
impeachment and trial, 201, 
278-281; Byron's verses on, 
275-279; his denunciation of 
the East India Company, 279; 
his oratorical defects, 281; his 
fascination as a speaker, 262; 
his studied "improvisations," 
179, 282-285; his intense toil, 
286. 

Siddons, Mrs., the actress. 114. 

Smith, Sydney, on the reading of 
sermons, 43; on religious audi- 
ences, 412. 

Socrates, on eloquence, 67. 

Speeches, how "delivered" in 
Congress, 43, 44; the practice 
of "filing," 44. 

Stanley, Lord (the Earl of Derby), 



his speech on the Irish coercion 
bill, 16; his voice, 75; his un- 
easiness before speaking, 149. 

Storrs, R. S., D.D., his first ser- 
mon in Brooklyn, 146. 

Strength, physical, necessary to 
the orator, 64, 65. 

Style, influenced by the voice, 81, 
82. 

Success, as a test of oratory, 205- 
208. 

Summerfield, John, 69. 

T 

Tacitus, on the power of the Ro- 
man orator, 41; quoted, 177. 

Talma, Madame, anecdote of, 77. 

Talma, the actor, his voice, 79; 
anecdote of, 98; saying of, 118; 
on "impulsive acting," 420. 

Taylor, Father, of Boston, 153. 

Theological students, their igno- 
rance of elocution, 411. 

Thucydides, saying of, 12. 

Ticknor, Prof. George, on Web- 
ster's address at Plymouth, 19. 

Titian, Sir Joshua Reynolds on, 
100. 

Tooke, Home, his failure in ora- 
tory, 188. 

Translation commended to ora- 
tors, 168-172. 

Trimble, of Ohio, his reply to Mc- 
Duffie, 219, 220. 

V 

Virtue, its value to the orator, 
125-128. 

Voice, the orator's, 73-89; its 
power, 74; its cultivation by 
actors and singers,77,78; Sainte- 
Beuve on, 76, 77; qualities of, 
78; may be improved by cul- 
ture, 79", 82; care bestowed on 
it by the ancient orators, 81; 
its connection with style, 81; 
distinct articulation necessary 
to its effectiveness, 82; our ig- 
norance of the working of its 
organs, 83; comparative merits 
of the bass, tenor, and soprano, 
83-85; its loudness confounded 
with force, 85; faults in its 



456 



INDEX. 



management, 85-87; H. W. 
Beecher on, 87; weakness of 
Cotta's, the Roman orator, 82. 

W 

Walpole, Sir Horace, on Fox, 248. 

Walpole, Sir Robert, 430, 431. 

Washington, George, his weight 
in Congress, 128. 

Webster, Daniel, Prof. Geo. Tick- 
nor on his eloquence at Plym- 
outh, 19; his defense of the 
Union against Nullification, 20, 
21; his speech, in 1850, in Fan- 
euil Hall, 21; his physique, 64; 
his voice, 76; his reply to Dick- 
inson, 76; his eulogy on Adams 
and Jefferson, 76; his gestures, 
96; on the Revolutionary Fa- 
thers, 106; his success with his 
cases, 113; his power in reply, 
136; silenced by a Shanghai, 
152; his study of the poets, 166; 
his first Bunker Hill address 
composed in part while angling, 
285; his oratory characterized, 
323-336; his personal appear- 
ance, 323; described by Sydney 
Smith and Carlyle, 323; com- 
pared with Clay and Calhoun, 
323; the orator of the under- 
standing, 324, 325; his boyhood, 
324; his first speech in Congress, 
324; his strong common sense, 
325; his reply to Choate in the 
car- wheel case, 325; his grasp 
of facts, 326; not eloquent on 
small occasions, 326; his wit and 
humor. 327; his readiness at re- 
tort, 327 ; his magnetism, 328 ; his 
reserved force, 328; his pathos 
329; his playfulness, 329; his 
reading, 329; his hatred of dif- 
fuseness and bombast, 330; his 
careful preparation for speak- 
ing, 330; his abstinence from 
personalities, 331; his reply to 
Hayne, 331, 333, 334, 440; his 
account of his feelings on that 
occasion, 334; his style, 332; 
his voice and action, 332; his 
self-reliance, 332, 333; con- 



trasted with Burke, 395; his 
preparation for his speeches, 
439, 440; his fastidiousness, 
440; on " extemporaneous ac- 
quisition," 440. 

Wesley, John, saying of, 109. 

Whately, Richard, Archbishop, 
on the failures of public speak- 
ers, 208, 209. 

Whipple, Edwin P., quoted, 268, 
280. 

Whitefield, George, on the cold- 
ness of preachers, 110; his elocu- 
tion, 195; dullness of his print- 
ed sermons, 198, 199, 379; his 
oratory characterized, 379-391 ; 
his precocity, 379; his immense 
audiences, 380, 381; his suc- 
cesses in America, 382; admired 
by men of culture, 382; moves 
Franklin, Bolingbroke, and 
Chesterfield by his eloquence, 
383, 384; his earnestness, 384; 
his physical and other gifts, 385; 
his vehemence. 385; his histri- 
onic talent, 385; examples of 
his eloquence, 386, 387, 390; 
his philanthropy, 388-389; Sir 
James Stephen on his labors. 
390. 

Wilberforce, William, 69. 

Wirt, William, on the eloquence 
of "The Blind Preacher," 19; 
his speech in the ' ' steamboat 
case," 60-62; on classical quo- 
tation, 62; on the style of elo- 
quence demanded to-day, 93 
94; anecdote of, 159; his prepa- 
ration for public speaking, 438 ; 
commends the study of oratory, 
439. 

Wit, a qualification of the orator. 
65; in oratory, 120-125; Fox's, 
250. 

Wood, George, his wit, 124, 173. 

Words, economy of, 101. 

Writers, why they fail as speak- 
ers, 186-190, 202. 



Young, Dr. Edward, his " Night- 
Thoughts," 114. 



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Explanatory Notes. By M. L. D'Ooge, Ph.D., Professor of 
Greek, University of Michigan. i2mo, cloth, $1.75. 

" I have examined it again and again, and am better satisfied with it than 
any other text-book on The Crown I have seen. I shall therefore use it in 
preference to all others."— Prof. R. B. Youngman. LaFayette College. 

JONES-EXERCISES IN CREEK PROSE COMPOSI- 
TION. With References to Hadley's, Goodwin's and Tavlor's- 
Kiihner's Greek Grammars, and a full English-Greek Vocabu- 
lary. By Prof. Elisha Jones, Univ. of Michigan. i2mo, $1. 

" No better exercises can be found for classes in Greek Prose Composition, 
whether in college or the preparatory school. "—From Edward North, L.H.D., 
Professor of Greek, Hamilton College, N. Y. 

JONES-FIRST LESSONS IN LATIN. Adapted to the 
Latin Grammars of Allen & Greenough, Andrews & Stoddard, 
Bartholomew, Bullions & Morris, Gildersleeve and Harkness, 
and prepared as an Introduction to Caesar's Commentaries on the 
Gallic War. By Elisha Jones, Professor in the University ot 
Michigan. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 

1 I do not know of a better drill book for classical schools to prepare the way 
for the reading of Caesar and to lay the foundation of a very thorough and accu- 
rate scholarship in Latin."— Prof E, P. Crowell, Amherst College. 

PETERSON -NORWEGIAN-DANISH GRAMMAR AND 
READER. With a Vocabulary, designed for American Stu- 
dents of the Norwegian-Danish language. By Prof. C. I. P. 
Peterson, i2mo, cloth, $1.25. 

"I rejoice to see the door opened to American students to the treasures Df 
Norwegian letters, and in so attractive a manner as in Mr. Peterson's book." — 
F. Sewell, President of Urbana University. 

STEVENS-SELECT ORATIONS OF LYSIAS. Within 
troductions and Explanatory Notes. By W. A. Stevens, Pro- 
fessor of Greek, Denison University, Ohio. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 
" A valuable contribution to our college text-books and ought to be most cor- 
dially welcomed." — W. W. Goodwin, Ph.D., Prof, of Greek. Harvard College. 

THOMPSON-FIRST LATIN BOOK. Introductory to Cae- 
sar's Commentaries. By D. G. Thompson, A.M. i2mo, $1.50. 

" The plan is thoroughly excellent, the execution of it in all points admira- 
ble." — Thomas Chase, Professor of Philology, Haverford College. 

ZUR BRUCKE-CERMAN WITHOUT CRAMMAR OR 
DICTIONARY; According to the Pestalozzian method of 
teaching by Object Lessons. i2mo, cloth back, 50 cents. 

" By far the best method to enable pupils to acquire familiarity with a lan- 
guage and readiness in speaking it." — Boston Commonwealth. 




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